Speechification

(Warning: this is really a slightly geeky housekeeping announcement. You’ll only need to read it if you’re interested in the way we do things round here).

So, a flimsier premise for playing Sailing By I’ve never heard. The clever people at BBC Future Media & Technology (FM&T, they’re called) are celebrating the fact that they’ve found a way of shoe-horning all of the BBC radio networks into the iPlayer (so far this is only available in the beta version). This has a number of implications for us here at Speechification, all of them pretty good.

First, we could, if we felt like it, now embed radio programmes in the same way we embed TV programmes over at Watchification. This might be a nice thing to do, especially as producers are now invited to ‘visualise’ their programmes by providing slideshows of photos or illustrations (or even video) that play along as you listen.

Second, audio quality will improve. The iPlayer versions of radio programmes are going to come directly from the network’s playout kit without going round the houses, which will reduce the chance of broken or incomplete recordings (like the messed up episode of The Essay I mentioned the other day). Also, they’re going to be encoded at 128kbit/s (and more for music on Radio 3), which is about twice as good as they are now. The weak link as far as we’re concerned, will still be the crappy way we capture the audio at our end but, unless we cock it up, Speechification audio should now sound much better—and we must remember to set Audio Hijack Pro to record at the new bit rate (if you can think of a way of grabbing the underlying audio file direct from iPlayer do let us know. That would be very handy).

Third, we’ll now be able to link to a permanent page at bbc.co.uk/programmes for every show we feature. This, as time goes on, will vastly improve the background information you get about shows we feature. Pages at /programmes are also going to start bristling with RSS feeds and other useful ways of getting at the shows and their metadata.

We also hear that many shows (those not encumbered by the dreaded rights) will soon be made available in perpetuity instead of for a measly seven days as they usually are now. This is an especially good thing because it’ll reduce the cost of running Speechification as we won’t have to host the audio files ourselves any more, which we think is kind of as it should be. The best place to keep up with what’s going on with the iPlayer is at the BBC’s own Internet blog, which has a special iPlayer strand. James Cridland is the manager at BBC Audio and Music responsible for most of the new radio stuff. His blog is here and here’s his post about getting radio into the iPlayer.

Incidentally, all of this change looks like it will soon be curtains for Real Player (from Seattle’s one-time new media colossus-turned-also-ran Real Networks) which makes me quite sad. I’ve been using versions of Real Player to listen to bits of audio on the Internet for so long now (for over thirteen years!) that I find it hard to contemplate doing without it. And it was always such a plucky little app, carrying on regardless in the direst of circumstances and over the crappiest connections. We’ll miss you crackly old friend!

By the way, at the end of this recording of Sailing By (made at the sparkling new rate of 128kbit/s for the first time) you’ll hear a bonus chunk of The Shipping Forecast. Please, in the interests of safety, don’t rely on this recording if you’re planning on going to sea. I recorded it three days ago… (MP3)

This entry was posted by by Steve Bowbrick on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 7:53 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.