If your audio player starts up, tries to connect and then fails, there could be a couple of issues.
It's possible that your player doesn't support MPEG streams (though that's unlikely).
If so, there are plenty of other player options described here.
Sometimes my stream can max-out -- it won't have any more available connections.
It's also possible that there's a problem with the data route between your computer and my transmitter.
That there are times that any web service can briefly become 'eclipsed' -- it'll disappear, becoming inaccessible from the outside world for a time, and then come back again as if nothing ever happened.
Or, my stream might actually be off-line -- you can easily check that option by looking up
my ShoutCast listing.
If that search doesn't return any results, then yeah, something's probably up at my end.
Sorry.
I do experience an outage on occasion.
My transmitter might lose its internet connection, or worse yet, lose power and shut down.
And yup, both of those have happened on multiple occasions in the past.
Not a perfect science this is.
Even when you have a successful connection, sometimes it might just drop out for about 5 seconds, then come back again.
Or you could hear brief audio 'hiccups'.
This is likely due to network congestion; it's a typical thing that can happen to media streamed over the Internet.
Similarly, you might wake up in the morning to find out that you got disconnected at some point in the night.
Sometimes during a 'hiccup', your player may lose the connection and not be able to re-establish it.
Again, that's the just the way the Internet bounces
(heh).
I still foolishly assume that WinAmp is the best player for ShoutCast streams.
After all, they were developed by the same engineers, eh!
If you're running Windows, then you may want to configure WinAmp to be the primary audio player for MPEG playlists.
This is done via file extension.
From the tiny menu in the upper corner -- could be a little [X], or a little [
N] -- choose
Options, then
Preferences... a dialog will open.
From the menu to the left, choose
File Types (from under
General Preferences)... this will display a list of 'Associated file types'.
make sure that the extension named "
pls" (or "PLS", whichever you see there) is highlighed, and then Close the dialog.
Close WinAmp
and any other audio player that's running, then click the
Listen link again.
If the non-WinAmp player pops up and complains (again), then it's going to take a little more.
Anyone that has multiple media players on their machines knows how much they compete for attention.
Almost like spoiled little children.
Firefox, Opera and Safari all have their own special ways of configuring their default audio players.
Internet Explorer is the hardest to tweak, because it uses the default Windows associations (which are annoying to reconfigure).
So you
could mess around with your MIME type configurations, but that's sorta cumbersome.
And it's hard to maintain effective documentation here since because newer browser versions do the same things differently, etc.
So.
A more reliable way to connect will be to do so manually.
First, right-click on the
Listen link and choose the
Copy Link Location option.
Some browsers might call this option "Copy URL" or "Copy Shortcut", etc.
After you do that, you will have the link to the MPEG stream in your clipboard.
Then start WinAmp, go to the tiny menu in the upper corner, and choose
Play Location.
When the dialog appears, paste the URL from the clipboard into the input field, and
Open the connection.
You can also use WinAmp to bookmark my station.
However, if for some reason my transmitter moves to another server, then you'll have an old address and you won't be able to connect.
No problem.
Just come back to this site and repeat those
Listen right-click instructions.
That'll give you a fresh change-of-address.
