Streaming web radio breaks up after a few seconds

When audio (music or speech) is being streamed to your iPod, the "file" (or each few minutes of audio) has to arrive at your iPod at least as fast as it's being played to you. If it does, then everything will sound okay and if it arrives faster than required, your iPod will buffer the sound in its memory. When that's full, it will tell the originating website to stop sending for a while. But if the "file" doesn't arrive fast enough, then you get breakup of the sound.

So even though your Wi-Fi connection may be good, the internet itself may be slowing down the feed of the stream and that could be down to any one (or more) of several things.

1. I assume your internet connection is broadband - that is the 8MB you referred to. Even so, it may be a slow connection, now or all the time. Have you done a speed test on your internet connection?
2. The website itself may be busy. Unlike broadcast radio, where it makes no difference how many extra peple listen, every extra listener on the internet needs extra resources on the interenet and on the website sending the sound.
3. Even if you have this problem with different radio services, it could be the App your using that's causing the problem.
4. The internet itself may be busy. It's like trying to make a call on your mobile phone (cellular) at midnight on New Year's Eve. Well, here in the UK, it was so busy, you couldn't do so.

One trick you could try; if the App you're using has a pause button, pause the audio for about thirty seconds and then re-start it. It may, possibly help, but don't put money on it.

In the future, this breaking up problem will go away, but the internet (and radio streaming) is still relatively new and that's why there's a problem. So new in fact, that no one has yet come up with a suitable name for "listening to a live audio feed over the internet, from an organisation that broadcasts over *radio waves* at the same time". Radio, you might say. Well no, radio is short for "broadcasting over the "airwaves" by usng radio-frequncy transmission.

I suppose "internet braodcasting" - but that's not very catchy, is it?

So yes, other peoiple wll also have the same problem as you, I do ocassionally. The only things you can try that may help are those I've suggested above - check the speed of your broadband and try the pause trick.

Good luck.

Phil

I think that the iPod's speed is probably considered normal. I'm certainly not surprised to hear that it's slower than the wired connection. I think that is due to the technology - in other words, the electronics in the iPod cannot manage a faster speed. I've just carried out a speed test at home. The usual advice is to do several speed tests, spread over a few days so you get a picture of what's going on, because one test may be a fluke, one way or the other. But here's what happened with me:

iPod Touch:
Ping: 311ms
Download: 1.41Mbps
Upload: 0.36Mbps

PC:
Ping: 53ms
Download: 2.83Mbps
Upload: 0.36ms

Notice that the PING (the round trip time for a signal to get "there" and back) is much longer on the Touch and the download speed is half the speed of the PC. "There" is where-ever it pings to, could be anywhere.

But - and here's the big but - it could be the internet connection speed that causing the problem. If the line starts off as 5MB, but then drops to 2.5MB while your trying to listen to the stream, I believe that would cause the break up. Did you try the pause trick?

If your interent connection is supposed to be 8MB (and if it's like the UK, your provider will say "up to 8MB", which means they can give you what they like), then 2.5 is definitely slow, and the 5MB isn't 8MB, is it?

So there's probably not much you can do other than hasle you internet provider about the line speed. I certainly don't think ther is anything wrong with your iPod though.

Sorry I can't be more help.
Phil