ianpwilliams wrote:The only minor gripe I have with getiplayer, or at least with the show I downloaded today, is it seems more compressed than the last Radio Downloader show I downloaded. You can see it in the waveform, it seems like the quieter bits are beefed up a bit. Unless they've changed it at the iPlayer end. Anyway, I'm sure it'll sound fine on the mp3 player.
Since the BBC blocked MP3 downloads for browsers that can't sign with an Apple SSH/SSL/thing, all of these downloaders have had to download the AAC version.
Here's how I understand how they work:
get_iplayer downloads the AAC and
remuxes it (losslessly) to an M4A (iTunes compliant file). You get exactly what was streamed from the BBC iPlayer.
Radio Downloader downloads the AAC and
recodes it to an MP3. You get a recode that is lossy (this is bad thing and why it takes so long) and therefore slightly lower quality than what was streamed from the BBC iPlayer. Depending on whether you have "Golden Ears" and/or good/bad equipment, you may not notice any difference.