Interruptions (...er, islands) in the stream.

[whackdoodle]

Can anyone tell me what causes interruptions, or dropout in the stream of a stations broadcast? For the last several days, Folk Alley (a great modern folk station) has been unlistenable because of the dropout. It's not my connection, because other stations broadcast fine.

[drewbar]

If you have no other issues with other streams, it might be just them. They might not have the bandwidth for the stream they are hosting.

[ujay]

Hi wackdoodle.

This is one of my bookmarked streams and I listen fairly regularly. Can't say I've noticed anything different lately but these things can vary a lot depending on time of day etc. See Sawg's post above.
They seem to be pushing hard for membership and one consequence can be that the number of listeners starts to approach the limit of their bandwidth. According to Shoutcast they can accommodate 2000 listeners though I've never been sure if this figure refers to per stream or all streams, probably all streams since they appear to originate from the same server.

You could try sending them an e-mail or something. I wrote to them recently regarding a different issue and they were very friendly and responsive. They fixed the problem straightaway and even offered me a free T-shirt

Been listening for an hour or so (http://wksu1.streamguys.com:8000) and the stream has been rock solid with just the occasional flicker of buffer filling.

Try going to Prefs(Ctrl+P) > Input plugins > Nullsoft MPEG decoder > Streaming tab > and increase the Buffer size to say 128/256KB, you can also play with the sliders if you like. This may help in holding on to the stream.

Here is a full list of streams available, you don't mention the one you are using, perhaps you will have better luck with an alternative.

128kbps .mp3 ... http://wksu1.streamguys.com:80
128kbps .mp3 ... http://wksu1.streamguys.com:8000
56kbps .mp3 .... http://wksu2.streamguys.com:80
56kbps .mp3 .... http://wksu2.streamguys.com:8000

For completeness, though I would reccommend you use the .mp3 streams if at all possible.

16kbps .wma .... mms://wksu.streamguys.com/folkalley/.wma
N/A --- .rm ...... rtsp://audio1.folkalley.com/broadcast/folk.rm

Enter the URLs in Winamp's Main Menu > Play > URL... box.
The MP3 URLs can be dragged and dropped on to Winamp's main window.

NOTES.

If you are on a network machine you may not be allowed to access the streams on port 8000.

The WMA stream requires the in_wm.dll input plugin, included in Winamp_FULL but not in Winamp_LITE

The RM stream requires the 3rd party 'Tara plugin for Winamp' installed.
The bitrate is shown as 14H(undred)kbps @ 44kHz ... clearly bogus and probably due to Winamp not being able to interpret this value correctly. You will see this reflected in the Spectrum Analyser which is best described as 'lumpy'.
If you are starting the stream by double clicking the playlist file(folkalley.ram) then 'Process audio through Winamp' must be turned off in Tara config.

UJ