Phasing out lower bitrate MP3 streams
Eventually, we'll offer 32k and 64k aacPlus streams for all our channels, 128k MP3 streams for compatibility, and 32kb Windows Media streams.
iTunes 9 now has full support for aacPlus (AAC-HE) streams, and this was the main player that didn't support it. Since 1/3-1/2 of all our traffic is people listening in iTunes, this was something that held us back from making more of a switch to aacPlus before now.
Also, as an experiment, we're running a super-high quality 128k AAC feed of Groove Salad that can be played by iTunes 9, Winamp and Foobar2000. Groove salad also has a 64k aacPlus stream you can listen to for comparison.
We will also be adding Flash-based streaming this year, which will work well for many people in office settings where they can't install a media player.
The listener numbers for the low bitrate MP3s has drastically fallen over the last year, and I can't think of any reason to keep the low-bitrate MP3 streams running. If you think we should for some reason, leave a comment and let me know.
I'm hoping that we'll get more adoption of the 64kb aacPlus streams which frankly sound as good or better than the 128k MP3 streams.
Labels: SomaFM






















