Starting February 4th, the drama ‘Private Peaceful’ will be available for download in 5.1 Surround Sound

After the success of the “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” MPEG Surround streaming experiment during Christmas 2011, the BBC is offering a radio play for download in 5.1 MPEG Surround for the first time.

For one week, Feb. 4-11, the listeners will be able to download the radio drama “Private Peaceful” from the BBC Radio 4 Play of the Week website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio4/2012/02/private_peaceful.html. To ensure the best surround listening experience, consumers need to download the Fraunhofer Surround ‘Peaceful Player’ application, available here.

The podcast tells the story of more than 300 World War One British and Commonwealth soldiers that were executed by firing squad. Ninety years later these men received posthumous pardons from the British Government, after a campaign helped in part by the publication of Michael Morpurgo's novel “Private Peaceful.” The radio dramatization will bring this story of injustice to an even wider audience.

“The BBC is committed to finding new ways to present high quality audio content to our audiences”, said Rupert Brun, Head of Technology for BBC Audio & Music. “The presentation of ‘Private Peaceful’ in MPEG Surround is the latest of a successful series of public experiments in which we have explored ways to deliver a compelling immersive audio experience. We hope this experiment will reach a new audience as it is the first experiment of the series to focus on drama rather than music.”

1. Download the radio drama here http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ptw
2. Download the MPEG Surround player .
3. Install the player on your Windows PC.
4. Connect the surround output from your computer to a multimedia amplifier or "home cinema" using analog cables or an HDMI cable.
5. Drag and drop the radio drama file onto the player and it will start playing.

The special player will only work for the two weeks the BBC is running this experiment, after which it will stop working and you should uninstall it. After the experiment, you will still be able to play the audio in stereo using a variety of media players.

We would like you to complete the short survey to help us understand how the experiment worked for you.

MPEG Surround is a feature-rich, open standard audio codec for multi-channel audio signals. As the name implies, it is a high-quality surround codec that allows the cost-efficient delivery of surround audio at stereo bitrates and is compatible with existing stereo receivers. It operates on top of any core audio codec, including AAC and HE-AAC, and provides virtualized binaural multi-channel sound reproduction capability for stereo headphones.

Click  to find out more about MPEG Surround.

If you want to stay up-to-date on MPEG Surround and our other audio innovations, please follow @matthrose or @FraunhoferIIS (German) on twitter.