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Highest quality ever radio station internet stream

kevtronics said:
MP3 is the only "guaranteed to work on everything" codec, because the patents have expired and it's now free to use.
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MP3 is also the only "guaranteed to work" codec for legacy internet streaming devices whose firmwares can't be updated. The earliest model WiFi radio sold by C. Crane in 2006, called the Acoustic Energy, was capable of playing back just RealAudio, Windows Media Audio, and MP3, for example.

Incidentally, this Hydrogenaudio thread suggests that AAC-LC is now outside of patent too.

cc333 said:
I haven't yet tried it on an old Pentium PC running Windows 95 or 98 (or even earlier; I think MP3 decoders existed for OSes as old as Windows 3.1), but I'm sure it would work fine with the proper configuration. If I try really hard, I'm sure I could even get my stream to work on a 286 running MS-DOS if I wanted to, though that's probably pushing it.
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With mTCP, you can make a computer as old as an 8088-equipped IBM PC with DOS 2.1 talk on the internet, provided you're okay with a bunch of text mode-only clients. I also remember finding and using an MP3 player for MS-DOS 6 decades ago. It could play MP3 files from local drives quite well on a 486 DX4 running at 100 MHz. It would be interesting to figure out if anyone in the mTCP community has written something like that which takes internet streams as its input.

I just now searched the manual for my ancient copy of Fraunhofer mp3enc30 from 1998 for 32-bit MS-DOS 7. It says nothing about decoding, but for encoding, it hints that "Version V3.0 of the encoder reaches realtime speed on a Pentium 166 when encoding at 64 kBit/s, 22,050 kHz, stereo. On a SUN Sparc Ultra-1 (143 MHz) the performance is similar."

Edit: I would love to see LGR install mTCP on his WiFi 232 and sound card equipped IBM AT, and stream Saul Levine's endless loop of "Back In The Saddle Again" from KKGO HD3 in MS-DOS.
 
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