cygweb

Things seem a little spotty, my friend - I tried listening this morning, and it's constantly rebuffering. I can't seem to get a clean feed from you at all, and that's never happened.

Hmm... it worked at home!! ;) I just got a connection here at work - it seems to be doing the same thing to me. Repeating the same 3-second lick and then rebuffering. I suspect the Icecast2 server is to blame. I'll check it out later.

Oh well. This stuff is all hacked together, what should I expect? The Icecast2 Win32 server I'm using is an alpha and isn't well-documented, but it's worked OK in the past.

Thanks for trying...

It appears to be working for me here at work now. I had about a 30-second delay before connection, but I suspect that's due to our recently-deployed proxy-server-based virus scanning.

Oops! Just as I hit "Add", my Winamp looped at about 2:30 of material. I can only suspect my proxy servers are not allowing direct streaming. Don and Citrus, let me know how it's working for you.

The first time I tried to connect since you moved back to 8000, it played about 20 seconds of the instrumental part of "Gravity Eyelids", looped the last two seconds, then xmms crashed on me. Second time through seems a bit more stable, though I've had one or two brief dropouts.

Oooh, Tarkus!

Oops... spoke too soon.

I got about a minute into Tarkus (the part where the main theme actually starts), and it rebuffered a whole bunch before eventually just stopping. I reconnected, and it's rebuffered twice in the last 30 seconds, but seems OK since. Of course, once I click "Add" down here, Murphy's Law will probably crash the stream.

In other words, we've got less glitches than before, which is an improvement.

What's weird about all this is that at home, I was able to connect to the stream from another computer, routed through my Linksys router (at least hitting its port-forwarder to be connected to the stream), and I left the stream up for at least an hour without any problems whatsoever.

Don, are you accessing the Internet through proxy servers?

If this isn't working for anyone out there, maybe I'll try switching back to Shoutcast (agggh, downsampled MP3) and seeing if that helps.

Don, are you accessing the Internet through proxy servers?

Proxy servers?! I'm insulted! :)

But, seriously, no. It's unfiltered access all the way when you're a network admin.

Hmm.. have you tried accessing the stream this morning? If it's messed up for you, I'd have to think my router is part of the problem.

Well, Citrus Commando and I have been doing some troubleshooting, and the stream only bonks with multiple listeners - it was going fine for me until he joined in (and vice-versa), then with just one of us listening it's solid.

Hmm... and supposedly I have 256K of upstream bandwidth from my ISP. Thanks for the feedback.

I'll try a torture test in my house (3 machines streaming is the max I can do). If that doesn't kill the Icecast server, then I'll definitely be suspecting my router or my upstream bandwidth.

One other thing you guys could test: I don't know what player you're using to listen to the stream, but Winamp's Vorbis input has its default buffer size set to 64K. If you have a similar setting, perhaps you could set it to 128K or higher.

I really love the sound I get with stereo 44.1khz quality -1 Vorbis. I'd hate to downsample, go to mono, or change back to MP3 to save some bandwidth.

Another thing. Could you do some file transfers from my site to see how fast my connection can serve? If you don't have your FTP info, I think I remember it and can send it to you.

Thanks.

I'm getting a pretty steady 13-14K/sec downloading OSI from you.

And JFTR, xmms' default Ogg Vorbis buffer is 128K. I'll set it to 256K (pre-buffering half to start) for shits and giggles.

Thanks for testing that - I think you'll like OSI, especially track 7. I assume you meant 14Kbytes/sec - right? If so, that's not as bad as it could be, I guess...

Please let me know if you guys start seeing an improvement with WCYG.

I have three internal clients streaming fine now, so I upgraded my router's firmware to a more recent version. Let's see if that helps...