First off a big thank you - RioPlay 0.28 is installed and working really well, solving my major issue with the base software - that it wouldn't support the MP2 / 48KHz streams or recordings from my Wavefinder (PC-based UK Digital Audio Broadcasting receiver). Both are now working, although you get the same background crackle you noticed on the resample from other sample rates (to me it sounds very like the crackle from a dusty vinyl record - not perfect but certainly better than not having it work at all!).

Can I make one enhancement request?

When playing in "Shoutcast" mode, it would be really good to be able to move between stations without having to go through the Menu / Select Music / Shoutcast / <list> routine each time - I can see two good alternatives:

1) Pressing "Select" Up / Down changes the display to Shoutcast Channel Select mode, with the current channel highlighted and scrolls immediately through the available channels, but without changing channel - when the required channel is highlighted then "Enter" changes to that channel.

2) The << or >> keys retune immediately to the adjacent stations in the list.

Either of these would be good, both would be great.

Really excellent piece of software. Now if only there was a way to make the Receiver directly support sample rates other than 44.1K to avoid this resample business.... Any ideas as to exactly *how* this is fixed and whether there really is no way round it?

Phil
Bath
UK

It is fixed in hardware, so to playback 48khz files we have to use software resampling. The resampling that Dave is using is known not to be particularly good quality, the problem is that higher quality algorithms are either complex to code or patented.

The code used internally within the Rio Car player software is pretty good at resampling, but unfortunately that is not part of the open source side of the Rio Car, so we can't use that.

florca
Do you use DABBar or WinDAB ?
Do you fin these apps to be stable ?

After about an hour or so DABBar seems to dissapear up its own a*$e chewing up all the CPU before it dumps. I can't even get WinDAB to start streaming it just reports socket errors. I'm running these in Win2000.

You mention the crackling, is it just me or does it seem 10x worse on the right channel than the left ?

Regards

D0bb1n

I use WinDAB on Win2k and find it to be very reliable. About once a month WinDAB will refuse to power up the Wavefinder and this can only be resolved with a reboot. Apart from that I have no problems with it, I use it for streaming to my work machine most days and ususally use it for local playback every other day.

I have not used DABBar for more than few minutes as I didn't like the UI.

Are you running any personal firewall software on your machine ?

Andy,
Thanks for the feedback. Yes I do have a personalfirewall running, but I've tried shuting it down and it hasn't helped. I think I'll try a fresh build of Win2K, as I also prefer WinDAB to DABBar.

Thanks

Dobbs

I've used both DABBar and WinDAB and both work fine (on a Win98SE base) - up to now I've used DABBar as I much prefer the interface and navigation (maybe because it was there first and I just got used to it...). However I think WinDab works slightly better for streaming to RioPlay, as changing stations across multiplexes works much more cleanly - you don't have to stop and then re-select to avoid the annoying jingle.

Haven't noticed the crackle being worse on one channel than the other - both seem the same to me - fairly low level and proportional to the signal strength (ie when there is silence on the station then there is no crackle, when the program material is loud then the crackle is more noticeable).

I saw the post before about the sample rate being "fixed in hardware", but I'm curious as to exactly *how* this is fixed, and whether it's beyond all hope of modification without a complete hardware re-design. If it was possible to (say...) replace one chip and modify the client to drive it, or mount a small daughterboard, then I'd be interested - not sure how much the warranty's worth now the box has gone EOL.

Brgds
Phil

I saw the post before about the sample rate being "fixed in hardware", but I'm curious as to exactly *how* this is fixed, and whether it's beyond all hope of modification without a complete hardware re-design. If it was possible to (say...) replace one chip and modify the client to drive it, or mount a small daughterboard, then I'd be interested - not sure how much the warranty's worth now the box has gone EOL.

Only Hugo or Patrick could answer this one authoritively I suspect. However changing the hardware is likely to be far harder than finding and implementing a better resampling algorythm in the software.

Dobbin - Ref. the problem about WinDAB reporting socket errors... Have you checked that the Shoutcast URLs you are using for WinDAB and DABBar are aligned to the requirements of each program? The format is slightly different, with WinDAB requiring an extra /mp2/ "directory" reference. At the moment I'm using different .arf / Streams.cfg files depending on the Wavefinder software in use, but I'm pretty certain I'll standardise on WinDAB given the issues mentioned above.

Agree that a better software resampling algorithm would be the easiest solution, but finding a way for the hardware to cope with different rates would be "best".

Phil

There's an 11.2896Mhz clock going into the DAC and CPU (256 fs) which locks the sample rate. To make it settable you'd need an appropriate 256x clock.

It's *much* easier to make a better resampler in software!

Hugo

Guys, thanks for your feedback, I traced the problem to Aventail Connect, a rather strange bit of software at the best of times.
Anyway thanks for the info, all is now working very well.

Cheers

Dobbin