BBC Radio Streams

BBC Radio is an operational business division and service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927). The service provides national radio stations covering the majority of musical genres, as well as local radio stations covering local news, affairs and interests. It also oversees online audio content.

AAC – Advanced Audio Coding
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates.

ADTS – Audio Data Transport Stream
A file with the ADTS file extension is an Audio Data Transport Stream file. This file format stores sections of an audio file in various frames, each of which include the audio data and header information. AAC files streamed online are often transferred in the ADTS format.

Bitrates
Data compression is also applied in ‘Internet Radio’ streaming. When audio is compressed in such a way through a streams encoder (regardless of the format the audio’s signal is coming from) the lower the stream bitrate used, the lower this will be in the occurring sound quality.

Audio codec: MPEG 1 Layer II
Better than FM quality requires 192-256 kbps
Similar to FM quality requires 160-192 kbps
Acceptable, worse than FM 128-160 kbps
(Based on stereo services)

Audio codec: aac v2
Better than FM quality requires 56-96 kbps
Similar to FM quality requires 40-64 kbps
Acceptable, worse than FM 24-48 kbps
(Based on stereo services)

(M) – Mono