The Jazz is a DAB Jazz radio station broadcasting in the UK. Unfortunately it's plagued by problems, firstly there are adverts on it, a pet hate of mine. Secondly it's DAB the first leap backwards in technology. Maybe monophonic audio steams of low quality MP3 are fine coming out of a 2.4" speaker but when you find yourself needing to hear music in a format that's enjoyable this will not do.
Fortunately I found a solution today.
The Jazz broadcast online in a pathetic 32kbps... or do they? It would seem when using Windows Media Player this is indeed the quality you receive. However, using an alternative player in Linux or OS X and I can pick up a much higher quality stream. Unfortunately I can't tell what quality the stream is, only that I can not recognise any encoding artefacts in the stream
and I can skip adverts if I let a few minutes buffer first or simply rewind to re-listen to the last song whilst waiting for the adverts to finish. Great stuff
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