Radio - Tech Support

[Warren]

I've noticed some people have been having some issues with the Radio, perhaps we can sort them out here.

First of all, I've had a lot of people complain of music skipping when i played songs.
particularly when switching songs. I got several reports that the music starts "stuttering"
afterward too.

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=373998

I found a similar report on the matter found there (and relatively recently) in regards to the shoutcast stuttering.

Their recommendation was to modify the "sc_serv.conf" file and change how it buffers.

  buffertype=1
  adaptivebuffersize=15

or try

  buffertype=0
  fixedbuffersize=256000

personally i think its probably related to the adaptive buffering, and a fixed size might be a good fit,
though one will have to experiment with it a little.

[Warren]

A second issue, is it appears that Firefox HTML5 embedded media player,  does not support
how the shoutcast server handles the MP3 streaming.  It appears to be a header issue, where
shoutcast is sending something Firefox doesn't recognize.

This causes the following error:

HTTP "Content-Type" of "text/html" is not supported.
Load of media resource failed. All candidate resources failed to load. Media load paused.

Upon which, the Firefox media element disappears, not being able to play the media.

I've looked around and there was not any immediate solutions to this problem, some
suggested it wont work unless played on port 80, which i ruled out as an option.
Some suggested using a PHP workaround.

Either way it appears Firefox is not a very viable solution at this time for using this media player.

I have heard reports that "Internet Explorer" does work, however they've also had issues with this.

Chrome, Winamp, and VLC
all seem to work consistently.

[George]

Thank you Warren i will check those

[immortal]

Thank you Warren i will check those

do checks and tell us result ? /me runs away

[Yusif]

i am not sure Warren if you mean firefox not support listen to radio when user joining webchat using firefox through http://www.librairc.net/chat

if that so, its work fine with me on firefox, Chrome, EI and Baidu .
maybe it just plugins for the browser which needed to be install

[Warren]

may i inquire what version of Firefox you are using Yusif?

From my reading firefox didn't support mp3 streaming, perhaps thats been solved.

[Warren]

Solved the mystery of the music playing as if its in fast forward.

http://www.headbands.com/gspot/v26x/index.htm

Downloaded GSpot that allows you to view Codec information for a particular MP3 file.

I viewed all of the files that played in fast forward, and all of them had one thing in
common,  it appears to be compressed as 22050hz  instead of 44100hz which is what
the player is streaming at.

- - -

Also ... I suspect that although the player is capable of playing/streaming .WAV files,
i think they might be responsible for certain website players stalling out.

So I'm going to see about converting some of the Wavs to mp3 and see if that
resolves that issue.

- - -

On another note, i discovered you can change buffer settings for your player. 

Winamp -> Options -> Preferences -> Plug-ins -> Output -> Nullsoft DirectSound Output v2.64  (double-click) -> Buffering

the lower the buffering, the faster it will queue the next song as soon as you change it.
the higher the buffering, will create a longer delay in song queuing, but is less likely to
create stuttering if your connection were to slow down or drop out.

Also there is a tab to change fading options before/after your songs.

I did have "Nullsoft WaveOut Output" selected, and this created a lot of stuttering
and Left / Right channel spiking.  Switching to NullSoft DirectSound resolved this.