October 22, 2005

• I enjoy SomaFM. (woop woop) They come listener supported. Live365 has some good stations, despite the obnoxious ads. iTunes works fine for me to listen. But then I'm on a Mac.
• What type of internet conenction do you have? What are you trying to listen to? What player are you using? What format is it? (wma, mp3, aac?) Are you doing anything else while trying to listen? (Downloading a movie on bittorrent for example) I use winamp or vlc. Woxy is the best station EVAR.
• wfmu.org, and I can never get the mp3 stream to work with iTunes so I use their Real streams instead. Yes, you heard me, but it works very consistently for me, and it doesn't seem to matter what else I'm doing with my connection. Their archives are mostly Real anyway.
• According to the front page of wfmu, the mp3 stream is 128kbps and the real stream is only 20kbps which might be the difference. It could also be a firewall issue if you are listening from work. Try the 32kbps mp3 stream on the their front page to see if it is the connection or if it is something with playing mp3 in general. I would also try to download vlc and try to use it to see if itunes is the problem.
• What type of internet connection do you have? Fixed Wireless. 1MB up and down dedicated with a 2MB burst ability with a 3 to 1 contention rate. What are you trying to listen to? Um. Internet Radio. It seems every stream I pick 3WK, Live365... ect. All of them seem to "skip". What format is it? .pls Are you doing anything else while trying to listen? Well the line in question is at an Internet Cafe I run. So at any given moment anyone could be downloading anything, but I run smoothwall and have squid up and running. Also all of the clients are capped at 10K per second. The PC I have at work is a 600Mhz PIII with 512MB RAM and Windows 2000, Ugh. I am using Winamp. I use this PC to ring up customers and to play music through the speakers. I am getting sick of our MP3 collection (all 300 gigs of it) so i have turned to internet radio for salvation. Side note: I have teh mac at home (G4 TiBook 1Gig RAM) and a 2MBs up and down fixed wireless line at home with a 20 to 1 contention and I have no problems with internet radio via iTunes.
• If you are using live365.com, you may be interested in http://live365.typepad.com/live365_station_updates/index.rdf in your RSS client, or if you don't use one, manually read http://live365.typepad.com/live365_station_updates/2005/10/friday_evening_.html http://live365.typepad.com/live365_station_updates/2005/10/update_friday_4.html and http://live365.typepad.com/live365_station_updates/2005/10/weekly_maintena.html in your web browser, which I'll presume you have. [The remainder of this comment applies to any streaming service, not just live365.com.] Many sites have been affected by the recent Tier 1 providers' (i.e., "the backbone") problems, and I'm not referring to the political fiasco recently when one decided to dishonour peering agreements. Not to get too tech-ish here, but the capsule summary is: The Internet backbone providers have been having troubles lately, and that causes troubles to flow downstream to most of the rest of the net, including music streaming sites. There was a very high-profile situation recently caused by corporations that chose to no longer play with each other ("peering contract violations," anyone? http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3554476) and there has since then been another situation caused not by corporate politics but by what some have called "a software upgrade gone terribly awry." http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/10/21/level_3_network_problems_affect_web_traffic.html) This can obviously affect much more than streaming music sites of course.