@Streamer201
You kindly give me more credit then I deserve, despite well over a decade as a software engineer I have not done one project that involved sound or video streaming. My area of expertise is enterprise web apps and mobile applications.
My knowledge of how sound is being processed is rather minimal, bordering on a level of an "advanced user" because as a hobby I like to produce music. With this disclaimer in mind let me try to answer your post.
When it comes to playback in my personal experience on my MacBook Pro the only problem I have is with streams, and not with playback of an audio in any format I may have stored locally on the computer. The iTunes dies after a few minutes of playing an MP3 stream from http://www.di.fm or http://www.sky.fm which are the only two net radio stations I listen to. Clementine plays stream fine as long as the format is AAC 128k, it stops and hangs when playing MP3 265k stream. The only player I found that plays MP3 256k stream for hours on end is VLC.
streamer201 wrote:
...I am still getting seemingly random "cut outs" but now I see from the EQ like meter display on the player interface that I am getting a steady feed from the station with no buffering issues, but the audio stops coming from my speakers.
If I tap the volume up/down key on my keyboard my speakers start working again. Sometimes the audio stops for no apparent reason and othe times it is triggered by me opening a web page or launching another program on my iMac...
In your case however you manage to get the stream playing again by tapping the sound. This is very bazar. Back in the old days when we had analogue stereos and radios this was rather common, because the volume numb was mechanical, consisted of a piece of metal wire sliding up and down a cylinder wrapped in a coil of capper wire. Any physical abstraction would brake the contact causing the audio to stop playing through the speakers.
In computer world we have digital sound controls, there is no capper wire coil, there is no mechanical contact. But on Apple when you tap the volume keys it also plays a "beep". I am really going out on a limb here: I wonder if that fact of sending a signal to play this "beep" in some way resets the mac playback system causing it to re-buffer or release some memory… I really do not know how the insides of it are built.
What is really weird is that from your post I read that it happens for you only on streaming audio and not on any audio. (correct?) I would think that no matter what the input to the player is (local MP3 file, or remote stream) the output of the player becomes input to the Mac sound system and is processed the same way before it becomes the analogue input for the speakers. Perhaps it is not so. We need a mac audio specialist here. I do not really know, only guessing. Is it the same with the playback of a local media file? Is there some sort of speaker protection built in to your external speakers, perhaps to prevent busting the membrane when there is too much lows?
Whatever the case is, the stream buffer should only affect the constant flow of data from the external source (web) to the processing player. After that the data is collected in a sort of a virtual holding tank (the buffer) and being processed for playback by the player which in turn passes it at a more or less constant rate to the Mac sound output system which in turn converts the digital to analogue and sends to the speakers. That built in system also receives the audio in a digital format, perhaps it has a buffer of it's own, perhaps it does not clear the memory properly and every now and then it runs out of allowed memory. Does not matter how much RAM you have. If developer tells a module in the program that it can use X amount of RAM it will use X and once it needs X+1 it runs out of memory.
Do you have any other third party sound processing installed? Something that perhaps attaches itself to the OSX sound system and is trying to make things "better". In most cases it only makes things worse.
My setup is:
MacBook Pro (Early 2012) - Last 17" ever made.
OSX 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion)
8GB RAM
VLC 2.0.3 (Plays any streams no problems at all)
Clementine nightly build 1.0.1-670 (Plays most of the stuff OK, except MP3 stream that is more or equal to 256k)
I do not suggest for a moment that upgrading to Mountain Lion will fix your problems. I do not believe Apple has changed anything in the sound system at all. In my own case the playback experience remained the same.
Try process of elimination to diagnose the problem.
A) Play MP3s from your Mac using the same player you use for streams - dose it stutter the playback after a prolong use? If it does - you know it has nothing to do with stream input.
B) Try playing stream via the most reliable stream player you have and not use the external speakers. If it stutters then it is not the speaker protection system of any kind.
In all of those cases make sure your system does not play any other notification beeps, such as sound adjustment beep, email or chat notification beep etc., as they might cause the same effect as you described in your post.
