Rocket Streaming Blog

Streaming Audio News and Tips

Rocket Broadcaster 1.4.13 Released

We're pleased to announce the release of Rocket Broadcaster 1.4.13. This cumulative update includes improvements to the Broadcast Audio Processor, bugfixes, and more.

Here's what's new in Rocket Broadcaster 1.4.13:

Bass Exciter and High Frequency Exciter PRO

The Broadcast Audio Processor has been upgraded with two brand-new components, a Bass Exciter and High Frequency Exciter. The Bass Exciter helps enhance your audio stream with a powerful, satisfying low-end. The High Frequency Exciter similarly boosts your high-end with enhanced clarity and harmonics, which fill out your sound. All of our built-in presets have been updated to take advantage of these new exciters.

We've also tweaked the Automatic Gain Control (AGC) to make it more subtle and less likely to overreact for some types of audio. A new Processing Gate parameter has been added, which freezes the AGC if the signal drops below a particular threshold.

For more on the new features, head over to the Broadcast Audio Processor documentation.

Extended Metadata and Artwork for RSAS and Radio Mast

This release includes preliminary support for a new "Modern Metadata" API available on Radio Mast and coming to the next release of RSAS. With this new API, the complete set of metadata provided from your radio automation system is passed through to the streaming server and made available to players. You will be able to finally move beyond just showing "artist" and "title" in your players, to show other fields like the album and genre. This opens up the possibility to even make your player react to the track category, such as showing your station logo during station IDs.

As part of this new metadata integration, we have also invented a new mechanism where if your radio automation system exposes the cover art for the currently playing track, Rocket Broadcaster can then pass that cover art image along to the streaming server, for it to be displayed to listeners. Instead of relying on hacky iTunes and Amazon brute-force searches for cover art, we hope to help the radio industry move to a more reliable, standardized system where your cover art is managed by your radio automation system and passed through your encoder to your listeners. This will help prevent embarrassing situations where mismatched cover art is seen by listeners and finally give you full control over the artwork displayed alongside your stream, without introducing complex new systems.

With this update, artwork passthrough is supported with the following radio automation systems or metadata formats:

We have analyzed 22 other radio automation systems that we would like to support, but we need the developers behind those systems to export cover art with their metadata. If you want a seamless cover art solution, you can help by asking your radio automation vendor to contact us, and we can work together to get it supported.

We'll go into more detail on how this new Modern Metadata API and cover art mechanism works in a future blogpost, when the next RSAS update is available (soon).

Raw FLAC Encoding Support

This update adds support for native raw FLAC encoding, which sheds the Ogg container in favour of FLAC's native framing. For historical reasons, FLAC internet radio streams have been encapsulated inside an Ogg container. The Ogg container format offers some advantages on paper, but has some disadvantages in the real-world which make it more difficult to use for streaming. Shedding the Ogg container allows a compatible streaming server, such as the upcoming RSAS release, to more gracefully handle source reconnections without dropping listeners, and stitch together a stream that players will tolerate.

Because Icecast was very late in supporting raw FLAC framing, there are almost no raw FLAC streams on the internet, and the ecosystem to support it is underdeveloped. To help nudge the industry forward with more reliable lossless streaming, in addition to adding support for raw FLAC to Rocket Broadcaster, we are also introducing raw FLAC support in the next update to RSAS and across our Radio Mast streaming services. To help developers ensure their players are compatible with raw FLAC streams, we have published a public FLAC test stream on our Reference Streams page, which can be used for QA testing.

On the playback side, raw FLAC streams can be played in Chrome and Firefox on Windows and through FFMPEG, but support elsewhere is lacking. As of today, iOS Safari and Chrome, VLC, Foobar2000, and mpv do not support raw FLAC streams. If you would like to use raw FLAC streaming, you can help by asking the developers of these projects to support raw FLAC and sharing our test stream with them.

Full List of Changes

Features:

  • Broadcast Audio Processor improvements:
    • New Bass Exciter and High Frequency Exciter, inspired by famous vintage hardware.
    • Added a "Processing Gate" to the AGC, to reduce overreactivity.
    • Updated presets to take advantage of the new features.
    • Two new presets: Radio Dynamics, and Polished, which use the AGC in RMS mode.
  • Modern Metadata API Support
    • Added support for RSAS's new Modern Metadata API, which includes passing more metadata fields along to listeners, including artwork from your radio automation system.
    • Supports Axel Tech DJ Pro, Audio Hijack, Jazler SOHO, and ProppFrexx ONAIR.
  • Raw FLAC encoding support (sans Ogg container).
  • Custom Metadata Output now supports two-line output.
  • Allow Shoutcast 1.x special characters error to be ignored, for compatibility with Azuracast.
  • Improved data validation in the Streams dialogue to reduce common mistakes.
  • Hide source kick message box automatically if a subsequent connection attempt succeeds.
  • Pass keyboard events through to VST windows, and window sizing fix for Stereo Tool.
  • New Metadata Formats:
    • Added DJB Radio On-Air metadata support.
    • Added Audio Hijack metadata support, used by Now Playing Pro.

Bugfixes:

  • Fixed "Monitor Master Output" resetting to off after restarting application.
  • Fixed rare bug where TLS streams could disconnect without the application detecting.
  • Automatically reset the Integrated Loudness measurement when changing the AGC power target.
  • Fixed binding to a specific NIC if your NIC has multiple IPs.
  • Fixed clock drift compensation bug if input and output devices had different samplerates.
  • Detect and report more "Audio Device Error" scenarios.
  • Metadata: Avoid sending the hyphen if the artist or title is empty.
  • Fixed "Link with Radio Mast" feature not reconnecting after connection loss.
  • Fixed a recording bug where recordings could still happen when low on disk space.
  • Fixed metadata compatibility with Shoutcast 2.4.2.167.

Download the Update