Archive → November 2nd, 2008
IRLP Upgrade
This weekend the Internet Radio Linking Project (IRLP) sent out an upgrade that would vastly improve the audio from node to node. This update changed out two files, the imike, and ispeaker. This allows nodes to connect to each other with uncompressed audio making an incredible audio quality. This increase in audio quality also increased the bandwidth required to stream the audio by 100%. Now the stream requires 80 Kbps to carry the audio virtually solidifying the requirement for broadband Internet.
To date, there are only five reflector channels that are capable of handling the uncompressed audio. These are 9200, 9003, 9739, and 9755. Nothing has changed on the reflectors except that the owners of these listed have set up those channels to select UNCOMP as the default codec. It is likely that not all reflector owners will opt to use this uncompressed audio because of the incredible demand for bandwidth. Since most of these reflectors are operating on donated bandwidth, they may be reluctant to double the bandwidth required if there are many users like the WIN System which typically has 50+ nodes connected 24 hours a day.
Any individual node that calls another node will be able to experience the improved quality of audio. Both of our repeaters have been updated to the new audio though our 443.3 repeater may not be noticeable because it is connected to the WIN Sytem 24 hours and they have not upgraded their channel yet on the 9453. I have been amazed at the improved quality as it is virtually perfect.
Another improvement that came with this, most users will not notice because it happens behind the scene. Before, when a node would connect to a node for the first time, it would automatically download two .wav files. These were the announcement files that you hear when connecting or disconnecting from the other node. After you visit many nodes, the node hard drive begins to fill up with many audio files making it difficult to do a backup. Also since many of the nodes are using older computers, they sometimes have smaller hard drives. With this upgrade, the nodes now stream these connect and disconnect announcements from the IRLP servers so nodes owners are no longer concerned with filling up a hard drive.
Dave Cameron, VE7LTD, the creater of IRLP put out a beta test version of this upgrade last Wednesday and more than 250 nodes participated with zero errors. On Thursday night, he decided to push the upgrade out on the nightly updates. On Friday morning, all nodes should have received this upgrade. We are thrilled with the performance on both of our repeaters. Since both of them are on broadband Internet connections, this higher bandwidth requirement was not an issue with us.
Thank you for those of you that use our nodes/repeaters.
Paul