Opie and Anthony randomly cuts out on PC

I have been listening to Opie and Anthony for a while now, and it randomly cuts out on my PC anywhere between one second to two minutes. It does it a lot. I've tried the Vuze player, WMP 9, VLC player, Winamp and a couple of other players. It happens in all of them. I have a good stable internet connection with nothing else going on. I was thinking about configuring QOS, but you need port and server numbers for it. I am running XPSP2. Any suggestions are welcome.

You've tried half a dozen other stations from YOURMUZE and they all do this?

No, I've tried streaming O&A on half a dozen players, it does it in all of them. I occasionally listen to other Muze stations, and none of them have this problem.

Have you tried listening direct from that station's web site? Does it work okay that way? What's its bit rate there?

Sorry I haven't followed this Shep, I'm in the middle of a dental emergency. I can't directly stream it, only through Muze.

angrygamer wrote:
>I have been listening to Opie and Anthony for a while
>now, and it randomly cuts out on my PC anywhere
>between one second to two minutes. It does it a lot.

I listened to YOURMUZE's flash stream http://www.yourmuze.fm/webplayer/?id=62198 and confirm the behaviour you report. Within the space of 6 minutes there were three periods of silence, each about 6 to 10 seconds. The player did not indicate any buffering trouble, and I believe some of the transmission was lost (i.e., the silent period was not merely an introduced lossless delay). In the subsequent 8 or 9 minutes, I observed no periods of silence in the broadcast.

I have no explanation, but I'm just a bystander here. I'd guess that the problem probably originates at the radio station's server and is beyond the control of YOURMUZE.

Perhaps you should email the station and describe the problem.

OK, after a google search, I understand a bit more about O&A. :)
Writing to the station may not be a good idea. If you click on the Name column in the station listing, you are taken to the page showing the stream that YOURMUZE receives. You can listen to that "direct" O&A (48 kbit) stream before it hits YOURMUZE, and determine whether the aggravating gaps in their show are evident there. I bet they are. :(

Sorry I haven't kept up with this Shep, are you talking about the *.asf file? That's the only file I have reference to, that I stream in players. At any rate I'm :25:00 in this morning and haven't skipped once. It had been skipping so long I can't remember the last time I had a steady stream. I hope it keeps up, and thanks for the help.

I was suggesting you monitor the source stream. You'll find a link to it here: http://www.yourmuze.fm/station/opie-and-anthony-live-stream?15

I am listening now, it has lots of gaps, and many not due to buffering. Windows media player indicates playing at 48K bits/sec, but now and then changes to 40K bits/sec.

OK, I see what your talking about. Eventually within the hour it was breaking up here and there this morning when I was listening and I ended up having to do something else and I had to quit. I'm listening to the station now and one of their other shows is on and I'm not having any trouble. But the other day I was listening to the station in the mid-afternoon a little bit and I didn't have any problems with it. When I have time I'm going to listen at other times in the day and see if the problem persists just in the morning or if it's all the time. Other than that I'm completely befuddled. I'll look into other causes.