ABC DiG radio (from STB) excellent! Who is listening?

[Ext User(Mike)]

The best use my set-top box is getting, is piping music to the stereo.
ABC's DiG radio is like an enormous iPod set to random. I don't
know how big their "play list" is, but its well chosen, and very
broad. Plenty of "new music and old favorites". More variety than
any FM station.
Most importantly, no advertising. I hate ad's. And no DJ's, which
I often prefer.

A lot of people won't like DiG because their musical tastes are too
narrow, and that's fair enough. Or they like to have an announcer.
But what do the rest of you think?

They also have a jazz channel. And you can listen over the 'net,
but the quality isn't the same. The DiG channel over digital TV
is 256kb/s MP2, which sounds good to me. Most MP3 players will
play MP2, BTW.

Is anybody else enjoying this station?

http://www.abc.net.au/dig/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_DiG

[Ext User(Anthony Horan)]

On Sun, 14 May 2006 10:41:40 +0800, Mike wrote:

> The best use my set-top box is getting, is piping music to the stereo.
> ABC's DiG radio is like an enormous iPod set to random. I don't
> know how big their "play list" is, but its well chosen, and very
> broad. Plenty of "new music and old favorites". More variety than
> any FM station.
> Most importantly, no advertising. I hate ad's. And no DJ's, which
> I often prefer.

And absolutely no information about what song is currently playing without
connecting to the internet and looking up the web site. Useless.

They need - NEED - to use the standard now/next functionality of DVB to
provide real-time now-playing info. They already stream the list of songs
played to their web site, so not having the info available on the radio
channel itself is both lazy and - sadly - typical of Australian digital TV.

> Is anybody else enjoying this station?

Yes. But it's frustrating as hell.

[Ext User(Mike)]

Anthony Horan wrote:

> And absolutely no information about what song is currently playing without
> connecting to the internet and looking up the web site. Useless.

How often do you want to know?

> They need - NEED - to use the standard now/next functionality of DVB to

You'll notice that the track info is _only_ available using a Flash(tm)
plugin. That would be really stupid, unless the idea is to stop
automated ripping of track info. If so, they would be unlikely to use
the DVB EPG functionality.
Another possiblility would be to add a low-bandwidth video track, as
used for the "guide" channels. That could show the ablum cover, etc as
on the website.
But really, it's just music, in the background while I'm doing
something else. And its not that hard to
open the laptop and click the bookmark to see recent song info.

[Ext User(Paul Dwerryhouse)]

Mike <mike.n@nospam-westnet.com.au> writes:

>You'll notice that the track info is _only_ available using a Flash(tm)
>plugin.

I just did a bit of network snooping on that flash app; it pulls its info
down from this XML file:

http://www.abc.net.au/dig/xml/justplayed.xml

Wouldn't take much to write an app that does something useful with it ;)

Cheers,

Paul.

--
Paul Dwerryhouse | PGP Key ID: 0x6B91B584

[Ext User(Anthony Horan)]

On Sun, 14 May 2006 15:34:13 +0800, Mike wrote:

> Anthony Horan wrote:
>
>> And absolutely no information about what song is currently playing without
>> connecting to the internet and looking up the web site. Useless.
>
> How often do you want to know?

All the time. The functionality is built into DVB, and DiG already has the
ability to extract song title and artist for their automated web site.
There's no excuse.

>> They need - NEED - to use the standard now/next functionality of DVB to
>
> You'll notice that the track info is _only_ available using a Flash(tm)
> plugin.

It never used to be. Last time I looked it was standard HTML. And it still
is:

http://www.abc.net.au/dig/songs.htm

> That would be really stupid, unless the idea is to stop
> automated ripping of track info. If so, they would be unlikely to use
> the DVB EPG functionality.

Why would they care?

> Another possiblility would be to add a low-bandwidth video track, as
> used for the "guide" channels. That could show the ablum cover, etc as
> on the website.

Bandwidth on the ABC mux is scarce enough as it is without wasting more on
another pointless guide channel.

> But really, it's just music, in the background while I'm doing
> something else.

For you, maybe. Not for many others it isn't.

> And its not that hard to
> open the laptop and click the bookmark to see recent song info.

That would require a laptop with an always-on net connection. If I'm
listening when the computer's turned off I don't want to have to boot the
thing, connect to the net, run a web browser and navigate to their site
just to see what that song was I just heard...

[Ext User(Anthony Horan)]

On Sun, 14 May 2006 19:05:07 +1000, Anthony Horan wrote:

> On Sun, 14 May 2006 15:34:13 +0800, Mike wrote:
>
>> You'll notice that the track info is _only_ available using a Flash(tm)
>> plugin.
>
> It never used to be. Last time I looked it was standard HTML. And it still
> is:
>
> http://www.abc.net.au/dig/songs.htm

Actually I stand corrected, it is indeed a Flash applet.

[Ext User(Mike)]

> I just did a bit of network snooping on that flash app; it pulls its
> info down from this XML file:
>
> http://www.abc.net.au/dig/xml/justplayed.xml


Paul, Thanks for that URL!
I feel a bit of perl scripting coming on. I plan to experiment with
Myth-TV, this would be perfect for a plugin.


Anthony Horan wrote:

> All the time. The functionality is built into DVB, and DiG already has the
> ability to extract song title and artist for their automated web site.
> There's no excuse.

I can certainly see how frustrating it would be. And from Pauls comment,
my assumption thats its deliberate may be wrong.

>>That would be really stupid, unless the idea is to stop
>>automated ripping of track info. If so, they would be unlikely to use
>>the DVB EPG functionality.

> Why would they care?

ARIA leaning on them? Lawyers. Perhaps it was a condition for generous
terms on royalties? Who know these days with copyright matters.
Note the mysterious "we are unable to tell you what songs are coming
up."(paraphrased)

> Bandwidth on the ABC mux is scarce enough as it is without wasting more on
> another pointless guide channel.

It might not be if they ditched the useless up-converted 1080i channel.

> For you, maybe. Not for many others it isn't.

Fair enough.

>>And its not that hard to
>>open the laptop and click the bookmark to see recent song info.
>
> That would require a laptop with an always-on net connection. If I'm

You mean there are people with digital TV, but no ADSL? :-)

> listening when the computer's turned off I don't want to have to boot the

These days, its not much different to turning the TV on. PCs have a
low-power standby mode, so no rebooting needed. (I'm resisting the urge
for a cheap shot at Windoze.) But yeah, no ADSL is a bummer.

If you can persuade the ABC to add EPG data I'll cheer.

Also, I see now that they have improved the bit-rates over the 'net.
128k with a modern codec should be as good as 256k MP2.

cheers, Mike.

[Ext User(Ted Harper)]

On Sun, 14 May 2006 18:41:44 +1000, Paul Dwerryhouse
<paul+usenet@dwerryhouse.com.au> wrote:

>I just did a bit of network snooping on that flash app; it pulls its info
>down from this XML file:
>
>http://www.abc.net.au/dig/xml/justplayed.xml
>
>Wouldn't take much to write an app that does something useful with it ;)

A while ago I wrote a little Windows "tray" application which shows
the now-playing information from dig (with a popup window with more
detail, album cover art, etc). I originally wrote it for use with
TheBasement.com.au - as an idea for them to make referral money on
"buy now" clickthroughs for the video clips they played - then I just
repurposed it for dig when TheBasement closed.

Needs .Net Framework 1.1 installed on your PC, but otherwise should be
ok. I haven't run it myself for a while, but if the XML format they
are feeding out is still the same it should still work.

The readme for it is at
http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/tharper/dignowplayingreadme.htm and
you can download it from
http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/tharper/dignowplayingsetupv100.zip


ted.h.
--
Ted Harper (Sydney, Australia)
Email: tharperREMOVE_TO_EMAIL@nsw.bigpond.net.au
Voice: +61-418-442-342

[Ext User(Mike)]

Ted Harper wrote:

> A while ago I wrote a little Windows "tray" application which shows
> the now-playing information from dig (with a popup window with more

Nice idea! Hmmm ... I think I just ran into a Microsoft/Unix cultural
barrier, when I tried to look at the code.

Does .Net let you do fancy things with http easily? Just reading
the XML once a minute could add up to more than 1 GB/month.
Using keep-alive, checking date-stamp, and just downloading the
start of the XML should improve things. Any other suggestions?
I might try something similar for gnome/kde. But more interesting
would be a full-screen applet for Myth, the home-theater-PC software.

regards, Mike.

[Ext User(Anthony Horan)]

On Sun, 14 May 2006 23:16:41 +0800, Mike wrote:

>>>That would be really stupid, unless the idea is to stop
>>>automated ripping of track info. If so, they would be unlikely to use
>>>the DVB EPG functionality.
>
>> Why would they care?
>
> ARIA leaning on them? Lawyers. Perhaps it was a condition for generous
> terms on royalties? Who know these days with copyright matters.

I think the concept of claiming copyright on a mere listing of programs is
the specialty of Australian TV networks, not ARIA :-)

If ARIA or anyone else objected, then the RDS song-titles feed on NOVA FM
would have been yanked long ago...

> Note the mysterious "we are unable to tell you what songs are coming
> up."(paraphrased)

Maybe they are running the channel on shuffle play :-)

>> Bandwidth on the ABC mux is scarce enough as it is without wasting more on
>> another pointless guide channel.
>
> It might not be if they ditched the useless up-converted 1080i channel.

That's now an even more useless 576p channel, there only because the dumb
DTV legislation demands it.

>>>And its not that hard to
>>>open the laptop and click the bookmark to see recent song info.
>>
>> That would require a laptop with an always-on net connection. If I'm
>
> You mean there are people with digital TV, but no ADSL? :-)

I have ADSL, but I don't leave my computer turned on 24/7...

> If you can persuade the ABC to add EPG data I'll cheer.

I'm not giving up on it, that's for sure!

> Also, I see now that they have improved the bit-rates over the 'net.
> 128k with a modern codec should be as good as 256k MP2.

Except that the MP2 audio via DVB is completely free :)

[Ext User(Ted Harper)]

On Mon, 15 May 2006 10:02:23 +0800, Mike
<mike.n@nospam-westnet.com.au> wrote:

>Does .Net let you do fancy things with http easily?

I'd say about the same as Java (think of C# as an equivalent language,
and the class libraries are more-or-less equivalent for network stuff
- nothing spectacularly different that would make or break it either
way). Certainly you can do async fetching and other goodness without
tying yourself into knots, but it's pretty easy to write bad code too
:)

>Just reading
>the XML once a minute could add up to more than 1 GB/month.
>Using keep-alive, checking date-stamp, and just downloading the
>start of the XML should improve things. Any other suggestions?

If the server you're talking to supports GZIP or Deflate compression
you could request that in a request header and if the response comes
back with the header saying it did actually compress, then decompress
it in memory before anything else. I can't remember if I did that in
that little application but I definitely do it in all my "real" SOAP,
XML or straight HTTP/HTML code because that brings the size way down
(eg 95% saving on non-trivial XML/HTML data being sent down the wire
and hardly any CPU cost for the compression/decompression).

>I might try something similar for gnome/kde. But more interesting
>would be a full-screen applet for Myth, the home-theater-PC software.

From memory processing the ABC's dig XML was pretty-straightforward,
and also fetching the associated album art for each track (which is
then just a normal image to display once you get it in memory) was a
nice and attractive addition that didn't take too long to get into
there once I had the plumbing for the basic fetching done. I'd reckon
it would make a good Konfabulator widget too, but I haven't had the
time to do anything in that space for a fair while, and I'm glad it
still works. I did a PocketPC version also (using the .Net Compact
Framework) and I found that convenient to use when I was listening to
dig in the loungeroom via the digital STB and didn't otherwise have a
PC handy to see the tracklist information.

BTW what really drove me in writing that stuff (or actually the
predecessor to that) was that I wanted to be able to easily "click to
buy" something that was played, and I thought other people would too -
seems a pretty basic thing. I mean imagine you are Telstra and you own
TheBasement.com.au (which played video clips basically 24*7) and you
also own a download music store in Bigpond Music. There seemed to me
to be a natural and convenient synergy between these "properties" (one
plays music, one sells music, a single click could get you from one to
the other and buy something you've just heard (ideally in electronic
or physical form, or even associated TShirts, etc) - or even give an
easy click through to a company website when an advertising spot was
played on the streaming station), but what did I know as I was only a
listener/customer.


ted.h.
--
Ted Harper (Sydney, Australia)
Email: tharperREMOVE_TO_EMAIL@nsw.bigpond.net.au
Voice: +61-418-442-342

[Ext User(Chris Runner)]

> If ARIA or anyone else objected, then the RDS song-titles feed on NOVA FM
> would have been yanked long ago...

What receives can get this feed?

[Ext User(Anthony Horan)]

On Wed, 17 May 2006 11:18:36 GMT, Chris Runner wrote:

>> If ARIA or anyone else objected, then the RDS song-titles feed on NOVA FM
>> would have been yanked long ago...
>
> What receives can get this feed?

Receivers with RDS capability.

[Ext User(Joe Murray)]

"Mike" <mike.n@nospam-westnet.com.au> wrote in message
news:446698e3$1@quokka.wn.com.au...
> The best use my set-top box is getting, is piping music to the
stereo.
> ABC's DiG radio is like an enormous iPod set to random. I don't
> know how big their "play list" is, but its well chosen, and very
> broad. Plenty of "new music and old favorites". More variety than
> any FM station.

an offshoot for ABC2 only, a half-hour interview and performance show
DIG-TV has now got an on-air date, from Monday Jun 5, 9 p.m.
Joe M.