Greetings,
i made a plugin for the FLAC/AAC streams of Mother Earth Radio including metadata and album art. I adapted @marco79cgn 's radioParadise plugin, thanks for paving the way to flac streaming!
Pull request is done, not yet published to test mode store.If anyone is interested to try out, feedback is appreciated.
regards,
Florian
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Nice one, hopefully it will be published!
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Any progress? And if I can help out with testing, do you have an install guide/link?
You could test by cloning my repo on your volumio machine:
git clone https://github.com/FlorianReiterer/volumio-plugins-sources.git
cd into
volumio-plugins-sources/motherearthradio
directory and launch
volumio plugin install
that would be helpful indeed!
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First impressions, itās responsive, album art and meta data are working.
But the sound is no good as of now. The volume is way lower (like 50%?) then with Radio Paradise, Tidal, Qobuz and with volume cranked up it sounds a bit dull as well (more like low quality MP3ās).
Hopefully you can fix it.
RPI 3b+ streamer connected via i2s to a Topping D90MQA.
I am on the newest Volumio image 3.309
I did a reboot to check if that would fix things but it didnāt unfortunately
Good luck and please let me whenever I can test an updated version.
Thank you for testing and feedback.
regarding the volume, mother earth broadcasts according to EBU directive -23 db LUFS. Thats a convention to even out loudness between stations. You know like in TV when you switch channels they should sound evenly loud. Seems web stations do not follow that convention very often.
Given your feedback iāll reconsider that. For a start i cranked the volume up to -16db LUFS, if i go up higher i would have to redo my archive. Iāll think about it.
Happy to hear the plugin works for your setup! Thanks!
Hi ,
Would you pls help me. I am receiving this error when try to clone 
fatal: destination path āvolumio-plugins-sourcesā already exists and is not an empty directory.
Thanks
You must have already cloned another repo i assume. If you want you could rename the existing āvolumio-plugins-sourcesā directory and clone mine.
That would be i.e.:
mv volumio-plugins-sources volumio-plugins-sources-backup
and clone mine afterwards.
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Dear @Vennesch,
would you mind listening in again and see if you are still unhappy with sound quality please?
I think the low volume should actually not sound as bad as you described.
I know itās an adventurous music selection, but if you hang in there some songs; you might have caught some of the vintage recordings that have differing sound to nowadays polished production.
Also, Beatlesā āhere comes the sunā i did record from my fathers music cassettes; or talking headsā stop making sense; so they do sound a bit muffling. Classical concertos are mostly pulled from vinyl originals, they recorded very different, but all of these are āfull of lifeā compared to, i dont know, rihannaās newest stuff?
Thanks!
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I didnāt know it was your very own radio channel. Nice! Eccentric music indeed, but I play radio partly to discover new things, so I like that. I will give it another shot soon.
Keep up the good work
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off-topic TLDR but maybe valuable information:
Mother Earth Radio broadcasts at low volume -23db LUFS according to EBU R128 guideline.
That LUFS thing and the agreement on -23db loudness was also made to oppose the āLoudness Warā, and Mother Earth absolutely supports that.
An example:
When i try to level i.e. a Frank Sinatra Vinyl Original from back then to, say, a louder -16db LUFS, i would get overs, signal peaks, that would distort and i would have to insert a limiter in the audio chain to avoid distortions at your speakers. That would alter the signal, and thatās exactly how we got into this āloudness warā. I would like to record this precious vinyls and deliver them unaltered to you guys and girls.
Using the high res flac format at 24bit depth allows us to use a little more headroom without losing too much of audio quality (see A/D conversion theory for details).
So, given the catalogue of vintage vinyl recordings, classical concertos and contemporary productions, i will stick with EBU R128 level.
I hope this will clean our ears a little from overloaded audio walls and relax everything a tad bit.
cheers,
Florian
Thanks for the plugin. Mother Earth is great radio and has some awesome music!!!
The plugin stopped working since yesterday - gives below error, can you please help?
Failed to decode http://server9.streamserver24.com:18900/motherearth; CURL failed: Failed to connect to server9.streamserver24.com port 18900: Connection refused
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yes, radio is currently offline - im running out of money. Trying to raise funds via donations, letās see if we can get back up with community help.
thanks for your feedback!
Oh! Sad to know that! I tried to donate via the radio homepage but PayPal doesnāt seem work (could be country restrictions - Iām in India), I will keep trying other payments option.
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Would Kickstarter or Gofundme be a viable option to raise funds?
to be honest, i wouldnāt have thought anyone would donate to āsave mother earthā, so i never thought about it. But some fine people already jumped in and supported by donations, so iāll look into it.
THANKS EVERYONE!
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Donated. Letās bring Mother Earth Radio back online 
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Who would have thought; weāre back on-air!
Thanks guys, you know who you are.
Main stream is up, the other two will follow soon.
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now back to threadās topic:
please report back if/how the plugin works, so volumio team can eventually put it in the store.
2 Likes
Plugin is available in the plugins store if set to test mode.
Please let us know if it is working stable for you so volumio can release to the official store.
thx!
1 Like