Hi, Thanks for this guide. I live outside the UK and was happily using the Windows PVR interface until it stopped working. Now, with the help of your site and a lot of trial and error I am once again downloading radio programmes using the pid command. 48kbps is fine for Radcliffe & Maconie in the car but if I want to listen to Late Junction (Radio 3) or Nemone's Electric Ladyland (6 Music) on headphones...I'd like a higher bitrate. I'm assuming it's because I'm outside the UK. Can you confirm this? Do you think using a VPN or some sort of UK proxy would improve sound quality?

Best regards,

Sully.

Howdy,

Just introducing myself:
I'm a longtime user of get_iplayer but haven't lurked around here **because of the excellent documentation**. I popped in today to catch up on the changes to the BBC's delivery of indices and thought I might ramble on about one alien's experience of Radio 3.

Quote:I’m assuming it’s because I’m outside the UK. Can you confirm this? Do you think using a VPN or some sort of UK proxy would improve sound quality?

You have it right.
To confirm this is still the case, I used a vpn just now and looked at the data of a couple of Radio 3 concerts with the switch.
I'm also downloading BBC radio outside the UK - and am very grateful for the BBC opening up the Radio 3 streams to us aliens.
I stream inside the web page whenever possible, but with a dodgy regional wireless boredband connection, I'm very grateful for all the work by user-2 to enable time-shifting when necessary.

I listened to my get_iplayer downloads of the recent fantastic Proms season in the lowest bitrate and found the experience just fine with a medium range Denon amp and some old plastic Bose speakers.
My experience of the good enough encoding in the Radio 3 files is that even the highest bitrate ones are
not hifi quality. They have more volume information, for sure, but not all that much more 'breadth'. The streams played via the iPlayer web player play them with a lot of depth restored, and I fancy that the tech involved is somewhat responsible for this. I have achieved better reproduction of some mp3s - not BBC, but similar encoding - by using hardware disc players more up the high end than most car and pc players, but is radio really worth this, I wonder.

As a contrast to the BBC, when going for hifi from public radio that you can play flexibly in your own player, I don't think you can go past the podcasts from France Musique as a benchmark for all radio quality online; they are light in size and heavy in quality.

If you feel like playing around with upping the volume of the low bitrate files without going to the fuss of tunnelling into the UK, you may find that encoding them 'up' with some ffmpeg switches will do the trick well enough for your car player.

Quote:car player

Oops, sorry. Make that 'ear' player.

Quote:<div class="d4p-bbp-quote-title">Quote:</div>Hi, Thanks for this guide. I live outside the UK and was happily using the Windows PVR interface until it stopped working. Now, with the help of your site and a lot of trial and error I am once again downloading radio programmes using the pid command. 48kbps is fine for Radcliffe & Maconie in the car but if I want to listen to Late Junction (Radio 3) or Nemone’s Electric Ladyland (6 Music) on headphones…I’d like a higher bitrate. I’m assuming it’s because I’m outside the UK. Can you confirm this? Do you think using a VPN or some sort of UK proxy would improve sound quality?

Best regards,

Sully.

The last time I used GiP abroad (as is - no VPN/UK proxy), I found that although all the Radio 1-6 streams were 48kbps, local radio programmes (eg Ralph McLean: Rock & Soul www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b038c4sb) seemed to be 128kbps. That was over a year ago though, so I don't know if it's still the case after the latest BBC changes.