Preparing releases from internet-based broadcasts

Internet Radios: Common rules, frequent mistakes and all about superior quality.

Basic Internet Radio Selection Considerations

• For TheMixingBowl of interest are only the stations offering DJ sets that you can't buy anywhere as that it is what TheMixingBowl is all about. Radio stations meeting this requirement are listed here.
• Only few Internet radio stations broadcasting DJ sets are suitable for TheMixingBowl.org as they do meet the minimum quality requirements to allow their sets being uploaded to TheMixingBowl. All other internet radio stations are broadcasting nuked sets of low quality (sets that would be available elsewhere in much higher quality). The above mentioned list of Radio Stations can be considered to represent a Whitelist of suitable radio stations.

Minimum Acceptable Bitrates

Minimum acceptable bitrates for internet broadcasts need to be taken into account. If you have a choice between different broadcasting formats, choose that one with the highest quality and that means that with the highest bitrate. One has to know that all digital formats used to broadcast music are lossy and do not contain all the original audio information. And low bitrates are extremely lossy and can easily sound very bad. Do never upload internet broadcasts with low bitrates to TheMixingBowl

The minimum requirements for a decent bitrate are:

• MP3: 128kbit/s,
• MP2: 144-160kbit/s,
• AAC: 128kbit/s (the older AAC format is not better than mp3),
• AAC+: 64-80kbit/s (the newer AAC+ format is really good at lower bitrates),
• OGG: 64-80kbit/s (the mainline OGG format),
• OGG aoTuV: 48-64kbit/s (a heavily optimized audio codec, the best available).

Apart from all these minimum considerations, try to avoid streams sounding "crispy" with lots of distortions at higher frequencies. Also, try to avoid WMA and RA broadcasts. Usually, only WMA and RA broadcasts at bitrates of 64kbit/s and below exist. That make sets recorded from these decent audio codecs unsuitable for TMB uploads. To make it even more worse, these formats often exhibit 'bitrate management' what means that your stream can jump between different bitrates during a set. Although the various Ogg variants appear to be the best available you probably won't find suitable radio stations broadcasting in these formats. Radio stations broadcasting in mp3, mp2, and aac+ are quite frequent on the other hand...

Ripping Internet Streams

- Suitable programs

- Guide to use the programs

Editing Ripped Internet Streams

- Suitable programs

- Rules for editing digital music files

Preparation Finish

- Preparing uploads...