Four web-radio streams to launch September 2
More details are beginning to emerge about the four 24-hour web radio streams CBC Radio will launch next week, along with changes to CBC Radio Two:
CBC Jazz: CBC Jazz will feature a “deep playlist” featuring jazz music and musicians from across the decades. You’ll hear an emphasis on Canadian performers and compositions (Michael Bublé, Diana Krall) but also favourites like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, and more.
CBC Classical: CBC Classical will play music from across the centuries includuding pieces by classical composers and performed by the best Canadian and international orchestras, chamber ensembles and soloists.
CBC Canadian Songwriters: Pretty much what it says. Artists heard will include Gordon Lightfoot, Bruce Cockburn, Alex Cuba, Feist, Basia Bulat, Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy, and Greg Keilor.
CBC Canadian Composers: The entire range of music composed by some of Canada’s most reknowned composers and performed by our premiere ensembles. Think John Weinzweig and Christos Hatzis.
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“the entire range of music …”
what the hell does that mean?
these descriptions look as repetitious and beige and safe as what’s on air.
actually, maybe worse.
will there be hosts?
or just a crappy jukebox programmed for bland?
Hi Schmuck:
Yeah, I thought the wording was a little weird (culled from CBC literature). There won’t be any hosts, but I’m pretty confident the quality will be one heck of a lot better than a random-play jukebox.
why so confident?
lack of human intervention?
and for quality….if you really love music (esp. classical and composition),
fidelity matters. whatever bitrate they stream at – and i bet there’s lots of compromises with compression even before it streams, i wouldn’t listen to streaming anything (esp. classical and composition) on my computer.
Is this a Web feed of the Galaxie channels, or YET ANOTHER duplicate service (Galaxie, Sirius, Web radio, and regular radio)???
Four distinct radio services for four different media? It could easily be one, much better funded service. Or, if online copyright issues are still a problem, then two services. But not FOUR!!! Especially when the radio service is underfunded already.
Schmuck, it will be interesting to see what the SQ of the streams are.
The current CBC Radio 2 is stream is 64KBPS, barely acceptable fidelity.
I am a seasoned audiophile of over 30 years & NO computer can match that of a good quality FM tuner. I bought my Mission Cyrus tuner back in 1987 & paid $400 for it. The sound is stunning, pity it will e collecting dust now.
I just hope the streams are better than 64KBPS.
re: classical stream
Anyone want to predict how long this misadventure frustrates disillusioned Radio 2 refugees before being shut down? I predict its demise in less than 6 months.
And its not really a dedicated classical format, right?
Why can’t CBC go cold turkey on classical. Just shut it down already. Do like Friesen, shrug your shoulders, look with glee at the bank account, and bid a good farewell to the taxpaying suckers who loved their music from the museums.
Go for it. Embrace the cannibals with all your might.
CBC Canadian Composers does sound interesting!
“Includuding” is a funny word. I like it.
[...] ready to re-launch on Monday (I blogged about it in March), CBC is announcing details of the four new Internet streams it promised earlier this year. The new streams will focus on Jazz, Classical music, Canadian [...]
@jan – No duplicates here. These will be entirely different than any programming we offer now.
@Philip Elliott: Here’s a little bit of a scoop for you — The stations will stream at a whopping 192kbps (!) which, as I’m guessing you know, is better than CD quality.
I’m listening to the Canadian Composers stream now (internal only; the streams don’t launch publicly until Sept 2) and it sounds perfect. A little bit of hiss, but I expect that’s from the original recordings. Or my crappy computer speakers.
The streams will be in MP3 format.
@Randall: Hell, I’ll take that bet! $500 says the streams are still up after your six month forecast. Deal? And yes, all the streams are 24/7 and 100% dedicated to their genre.
– Tod (I really don’t know why it keeps calling me “author” on here, but whatever.)
The new CBC online Radio streams are being programmed by CBC music producers. The Canadian Composers channel features the music of Canada’s best composers and ensembles. The range of styles and performance formats is vast. This channel offers a great opportunity for our composers and ensembles to become better known and appreciated.
Tod,
192kbps is not better than CD-quality. CD audio is entirely uncompressed playing at 44100 Hz. MP3 audio is lossy compression playing at 44100 Hz. Audio is only CD-quality if there is zero lossy compression.
Secondly, blind listening tests (eg. http://www.soundexpert.info/coders192.jsp ) show that OGG Vorbis has the best audio fidelity out of any audio compression format. As a bonus, it is patent-free. Please choose Vorbis instead.
Thirdly, I’d like to know how “CBC Classical” will be different from the Galaxie Classical offerings.
Finally, I’d like to know why CBC is moving the music it believes to be for ‘old people’ off of the airwaves onto the internet.
Sorry, but MP3 streams are by definition less than “CD quality”, no matter what the bitrate.
MP3 strips out a lot of the things that are distinctive about classical recordings: wide dynamic range, a complex stereo image, and a wide difference in volume across different instruments. Much of this information is lost.
I’m glad to see that there will be a Canadian Composers channel.
The Classical and Jazz streams are already listed in my iTunes radio directory … great sound !!!
Now I just have to get the *.acx urls for these streams so I can listen to them through my Denon !!
Anybody got the goods and want to share?
cheers.
It would placate a lot of disappointed Radio 2 listeners if there was the possibility of further development of the web-radio service, particularly through the addition of hosts. You see, most serious music lovers have an extensive cd/mp3 collection. They listen to radio not only to hear recordings they haven’t got, but to learn about them. The most important part of Radio 2 for me has always been it’s educational aspect, to have personalities who know music, and who can explain it. My family’s interest in music has been nurtured by Radio 2 for years; it is one of the main reasons why one of my brothers and myself decided to study music in university.
Radio 2 has generally aired a lot of archived material from time to time, especially during the summer.
The classical web-stream you are proposing would be much more popular if instead of being music only, you recycled old classical programming from Radio 2, or had some new material recorded (simply verbally identifying the music played, or occasionally giving some background information.) It would make a lot of people very happy, and otherwise, what have you got? Something I could get by pressing shuffle on my ipod! (Completely not worth your time or money…)
Especially with Canadian composers… you really should have some educational programming giving information and analysis.
Tod, I would be willing to take a modified $500 bet, based on these conditions:
– I’m interested in betting on the CBC Classical Stream only.
– I would extend the deadline to 2 years. The CBC moves pretty slowly. Look how long Air Farce and Red Green hung around.
– I’d like to see what it is first. There has been zilch promotion for this. I just spent a half hour fruitlessly hunting for so much as a press release on the main CBC web site. I found one bit of info in a reply Li Robbins posted to a comment to the R2 blog. I have collected every Saturday Globe and Mail Review ad for months and nada. If it turns out to be repackaging of the 10-3 show’s content, then it will be cheap to produce and a small target. Likewise, if it is only 2 hours of new content per day.
- Let’s make the bet in the form of a donation. I’d like it to be to something like the VSO, Alberta Baroque Ensemble or an hour of CKUA’s Classic Examples but am willing to negotiate as long as we support art with this.
- If you lose your job at the CBC within 2 years, you are allowed to cancel the bet.
Meanwhile, thanks for posting useful info like streaming rates and formats. Will I be able to download it as a podcast? Hope you don’t get in trouble for releasing secret information. Feel free to post a link if there is a announcement on cbc.ca somewhere that I missed.
I suggest that you email me personally to discuss further details of the bet.
Regards,
Peter Brandon, Edmonton
This will be interesting. Although the demise of the CBC Orchestra is simply inexcusable and I will really miss Music & Co., at least the webstreams have the potential to give listeners their particular genre without trying to please everyone, as the revised regular Radio 2 programming can only fail miserably to do.
As to audio quality, no MP3 stream at ANY bit rate can “be better than CD quality” as there is still data reduction. However, 192k will be good enough for non-critical listening- especially in today’s “iPod” world, where MP3 has become a sort of quality standard. The built-in D-A converters in computers are only of “consumer” quality anyway, so unless one is an audio professional and has a studio-grade adaptor card, such as RME or Lynx or better, the bit-rate won’t likely be the limiting factor.
I stand corrected on the bit-rate. I do, however, stand by my prediction that the four streams will be presented in Living Stereophonic Sound!
The streams formally launch Tuesday. Although, ahem, you may want to check out the Jazz and Classical categories in iTunes right now. I’m just sayin’.
@Peter/Randall:
Ahh, you’re changing the terms of our deal!
You commented that you predicted the streams would be shut down in less than six months.
If you’ve got $500 to wager on THAT forecast, you’re on.
But now that I’m calling your bluff, your terms have “modified” to apply to the Classical stream only, based on a shut-down within 24 months (not six,) and you want to hear the stream first.
How about this. Have a listen to the streams for a week or two when they launch and let me know if you’re still up for the original deal.
Actually, I think there’s probably some law against us wagering at all, so consider this for fun purposes anyway.
> If you lose your job at the CBC within
> 2 years, you are allowed to cancel the bet.
Actually, I’m just a contractor, not a lifer.
> Will I be able to download it as a podcast?
Sadly no. They’re two different animals. These are 24/7 live streams. We do offer podcasts of some CBC Radio shows but since we don’t have the rights to make music available in download form, nearly all of the podcasts are either talk only or have the music manually stripped out (or changed to production music for which we do have the download right) before they go up. Not exactly producers’ favourite job.
OK – we’ve had the Classical stream on iTunes over dinner. So far we’ve heard a 19th C piano transcription of Wagner, which immediately went into a baroque cello work, followed by the currently playing Brahms’ Rhapsody #2. It’s all very jarring. Is anyone giving any serious thought to playlists down there, or do you just have a huge classical playlist on a giant ipod, set to shuffle willy-nilly?
Will there be some sort of web resource to tell us who is actually performing?
thanks
Bruce
Oh dear… based on listening to the classical stream for the last hour, (7:30-8:30pm PDT) it is just as I feared: a tightly-edited mélange of “safe-vanilla” classics devoid of personality, with not a single comment from a live person. Just as poster “ghurley” suggested above, a “Galaxy-type” product; the sort of thing shops subscribe to for background music. Why is CBC wasting OUR money on this? I can get classical Muzak elsewhere, thank you. The audoi quality is excellent, but Muzak doesn’t need 192 k; 64k will be just fine.
If this is what the final product will be like, I’ll stick with the US stations I’ve been tuning into for quite a while now- KSUI (Iowa City), KWAX (Oregon), NWPR, WFMT (Chicago) etc., as well as the BBC.
My tax dollars at work… unfortunately.
I am so angry about these changes. I miss Shelley Solmes so much it enters my head every single morning. Now you’re changing the entire format and deleting most of the knowledgeable hosts that we’ve all come to love. Absolutely disgraceful. I hope the idiots in charge at Radio 2 that are responsible for this atrocity quickly find themselves out of work.
I know this forum is about internet streaming, but the main points have been adequately summarized already.
RADIO 2 IS ABOUT MORE THAN JUST MUSIC! DON’T YOU GET THAT?! You can’t replace it with an internet classical radio station and call it the same!
Fools.
It doesn’t matter to me what the stream rate will be. Like a lot of other rural Canadians, I am currently limited to 22kbs by my distance to the nearest Bell switching station. I’m reaching $1600 dollars so far this year trying to get better access, but as the cost goes up, the service goes down. My next attempt won’t have enough bandwidth to permit streaming other than occasionally before I get throttled back. Right now I’m listening to the “New Radio 2″ (Sept 1, am) and I can;’t tell it apart from the mainstream commercial stations. Actually I would appreciate a good commercial to break up the inanity of this c**p. This is supposed to be different????
To the CBC.
I too am very disappointed with what I see and hear happening at CBC. As a lover of music, I look for great artists AND information about them and it is for this reason that I have been tuning into CBC Radio 2 for decades. It was not only to hear music new to me, but to listen to people like Bob Kerr, Rick Phillips, Howard Dyck and Tom Allen discuss the music they were playing. This is what radio should be about; educating along with listening to music. If one wants popular music then it’s VERY easy to find; just twist the dial, it doesn’t take much. It does take a lot to compose a major orchestral or choral work and that’s why people with any degree of musical sophistication listen to the classics, these pieces have the substance required to keep them fresh centuries after they were composed. And with each piece comes a fascinating story of what each composer was going through at the time. The old CBC gave me that and I am grateful for having learned as much as I have.
I have spent about four hours listening to your new CBC online classical station streaming from the Internet today and even at 192kbps, I was unimpressed because of all the mp3 artifacting, rendering the music barely listenable to on a good system. I agree with others; use a better codec than mp3. But, the most disturbing thing about your new service is the fact that there was no host to speak of, just a voice coming on every so often to tell me which station I was listening to, which I already knew. BTW There wasn’t even information about who was performing the work, just the name of the composer and which piece it was, so please give credit to which recordings you are using by including that text information in the wrapper containing the mp3 data along with the composer and the composition.
CBC; world class you once were, but sadly are no longer. It’s a shame and is quickly becoming a sham.
Tim
so where are the m3u or pls files for these streams/channels? heck, even an mms:// url would be better than the embedded flash player.
jason.
Thumbs up for Tempo – thumbs down on Drive! How do I find the classical music stream? Help!!
What a bunch of poopy pants naysayers! Despite your unhappiness, at least give these changes a chance and let CBC tinker with things and get it all sorted out.
Sad to say, so far, I’m not impressed. It seems like glorified muzak and NO commentary. That’s what I’ve heard on CBC Classical.
I’ll try to give it time, but I’m not holding much hope
Well, CBC, it’s been a pretty good 35+ years but I’m fed up and am moving on – to US stations such as KSUI, KWAX, WFMT, NWPR etc. and BBC 3.
As a (mostly) classical music listener who especially loved Music & Company with Tom Allen, the new Radio 2 is a total disappointment. Tom’s new show, from the little I could bear, is mostly pop music, which doesn’t interest me at all and not even he can save it. The 10-3 classical “sop to Cerberus” with Julie Nesrallah is OK, but I want to start my day with classical music. For me the rest of the day’ s programming is a write-off, aside from Katie Malloch and Tonic. (I do miss Ross Porter, though, as wonderful as Katy is.)
As to the iTunes classical stream, it’ s just what I feared- a tightly-edited sequence of “safe” classical music with no live personality. Nice Muzak for a shop or restaurant, but totally sterile otherwise. (As Lily Tomlin said, “I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.” Amen!)
No thanks, Mr. Steinmetz, Ms. Maguire, et al. You’re wasting my tax money. I’m moving on.
Author/Tod
Based on a few hours of listening to the Classical stream only and your reply, I agree with you to withdraw the bet. Here’s why:
1. Looks like Michael was right when he speculated about it being like an ipod on shuffle play. It sounds close to that, with only single tracks being played and a general recorded channel intro popping up once in a while. This must be incredibly cheap to produce, now that the technical setup is done. Something this cheap would not be a large target for future cutbacks.
2. I wouldn’t want to soak a contractor without a dental plan for $500. Spend the cash on a dentist – you’ll thank me in 10 years
With no hosts or complete pieces played beginning to end, this has a muzaky feel. Is a human being selecting the tracks, or has an algorithm been written to do it? There is little sense of program flow here, except that the choices are extremely conservative. I think that restaurant owners who were using R2′s classical music for background music could use this service. I tried the songwriter channel for about 3 tunes before deciding that it would be similar, only matching different restaurant decor. Hardly the “deeper experience” CBC brass led us to believe.
As a home user who does not have my laptop hooked up to my stereo, I would not listen to this unless I was working at my PC and even then I would probably look elsewhere. Fidelity seems to be OK, although once in a while, service is interrupted for buffering.
>we don’t have the rights to make music available in download form
Somehow the CBC digs up enough money to pay copywrite for a weekly (pop-dominated) Canada Live podcast. There is now a million more to spend on live concerts from the old orchestra budget. After 3 days, Tempo hasn’t broadcast enough live music to fill even a single old Studio Sparks episode, so that excuse won’t wash. The least you could do is pay a little more to make what little concert coverage you have left
available to mobile listeners.
Peter
The CBC might as well play classical shows from 40 years ago. How is anybody gonna tell the difference?
One addition to my previous comment about this being suitable for restaurants: Make sure you check the download limits on your ISP account. That 129 kbps adds up. I just checked on my usage for the day that I listened to 2-3 hours of streaming music, and my download usage blipped up by 1/2 a Gig. If you are on a residential lite plan, you’d have the download speed to run the stream, but could easily blow out your 10 Gig limit and then be subject to whatever penalties your ISPs may impose. If you were running a small restaurant and wanted it for background music, you could easily exceed a residential plan.
This is not free like broadcast radio.
Peter
http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/blog/2008/09/02/tech_q_how_to_listen.html
As an expat Canadian living in Pittsburgh, I was delighted to find the CBC feeds on itunes, and have been enjoying the classical as well as the jazz feeds this past weekend. The stream rate provides for terrific fidelity as far as Im concerned.
All said, thank you CBC, please don’t hastily yank the streams, this is a good thing. Now if only you could bring back the Beachcombers…