My streaming music is skipping!

[Keiran Foxclaw]

My streaming music is skipping. It persists from parcel to parcel and doesn't affect anyone else? It also skips when I use my own stream, and I can verify that it's not my broadcaster skipping.  Anyone know what might be causing this and how to resolve it?  It's been happening in Phoenix, and I tried firestorm this morning, and that was even worse.

[Rolig Loon]

Check your router first.  See if plugging your cable directly into the modem helps.  If so, then go back and reboot your router to clean it out and get a fresh connection. (If you're using wireless, of course, switch to a cable and that may cure the problem right there.)  Also, check to see if you have some program running in the background on your machine that could be messing things up.  One potential culprit is your antivirus progrogam.  Norton, in particular, insists on scanning every single texture that enters your cache unless you make an exception for it.

[Monti Messmer]

Try any other music player, winamp, Windows Media Player ...

Put in the URL and see. Winamp sometimes keeps buffering then you know it´s a bandwith thing on your side.

Monti

[Shockwave Yareach]

Most frequently this is caused by people not having enough UP bandwidth to stream the music, causing gaps in the stream that are filled in by repeats of the previous packets by the music players.  You'd no doubt have the same problem turning your Winamp or Media player to the address of the stream.

 

And THIS is most often caused by people who try to play music to a parcel and their friends directly from their homes, with no relay. 

 

Let's pretend I'm in your parcel and I'm listening to the 128Kbps music stream from your in-house music server.  This causes your server to make and feed a single connection and 128Kbps upstream data flows.  Now I invite 3 friends to come listen.  Now your server has to handle 4 seperate connections and send four 128Kbps streams to four different IP addresses - you are now pumping 512Kbps upload rate, not counting commands you give the viewer (walking, talking, turning, touching, paying).   Since many DSL and cable plans have 500kbps as a maximum upload rate (and usually slowdown to 400Kbps at peak times) you are trying to push data far faster than the network can accept it.  This causes packets to be dropped and discarded before ever reaching the net.  And this causes the stream to halt and skip.

 

Unless you have something in the neighborhood of 5Mbps upload rate minimum, you aren't going to be able to handle lots of people in a parcel without a relay.  A relay is a colo server running Shoutcast that you send your stream to, and IT is what all the computers around the world connect to.  They typically have 100Mbps connections to the backbone (as they are designed for website hosting) and can send lots of music to lots and lots of people.  And all you have to have is a single upload rate of greater than 2x128Kbps to send the music stream to your colo.  It is not easy, it is not cheap, and it's something only the geekiest of us do just for fun.  Most people rent time on someone elses colo and stream to it for a short while as it's more cost effective -- several outfits in SL are in just that sort of business.

[Faubio Alter]

Some practical advise is to click the play button when it freezes, this will fix it some. Do it repeatedly, as necessary. (It's not caching enough information before it needs it.)