Audio streams stop working after visiting certain places

Hello everybody,

I'm not sure if anybody can help me, but here goes.

My audio/music stream works fine until I go to certain places with certain radios and then it stops working. I then have to quit Second Life and restart it in order to get audio streams to work again.

Case in point, a friend has an apartment with an internet radio in it. The radio pulls streams from the internet. My music will work fine at every place I go to but when I go back to her apartment, my music stops working immediately and will only start again after relogging into second life. This also happened to me at an NCI party. I'm sure there's other places as well because I frequently have to relog to fix this problem. I only finally figured out the duplicatable steps required in order to make this happen.

Note: I can still hear audio like people's applause or other sound effects. Only the music stream stops working.

If anyone has and ideas, I'm listening.

Mandrake Nitely

This has never happened to me, but I usually don't hop from one sim stream to another. Isn't there a way to disable audio streams while you're still inworld? Have you tried disabling then enabling?

try as isabeau stated stopping then restarting your player. sometimes waiting a few minutes before you restart your player is needed for the stream to load.

Okay, I switched off the player and left it fully off for five minutes. It still didn't come back on. I also went into the preferences and disabled audio streams, and then re-enabled them. It had no effect. Any other ideas? Does anybody know if SL uses Windows Media Player or something? Maybe mine's broken and I need to reinstall it or something.

I just found out it only happens when the radio is tuned to certain stations. If it's left on a certain station it breaks my audio and i have to relog sl. If the radio is still tuned to the same station after i relog my audio is instantaneously broken and another relog is required to fix it. so it must be a problem with certain internet audio feeds. does that help jog anyone's mind about what might be causing this?

SL™ uses QuickTime. Perhaps a reinstall of QT will help.

Thanks. I upgraded QuickTime but it still didn't help. Must be something else.

I have had similar spotty success with listening to music streams in SL. Especially if I change the land music URL. I figure its just another SL bug.

Just an off chance thing here but ...

Start > Run > type in "cmd" and enter
In the console window that pops up, enter this command:
IPCONFIG /FLUSHDNS

(case does not matter, I just did all caps for easier reading)

I tried flushing the dns before listening to the radio. Then flushing the dns after the radio stopped working. Then stopped and restarted my player. It still didn't work. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Since audio streams are a direct secondary connection between you and the media url, and since you say many/most do work but a few urls break SL's™ ability to connect to any of them, I'd suspect a realtime virus scanner or firewall was autoblocking, or stepping in the way, triggered by certain urls or domains.
To test that, i would copy the media url (ip addy : port) that you say always breaks your audio, and "open url" with windows media player or winamp. If it can't open it, play it, or if it breaks THAT programs ability to open other url's, then you'll know it's some software you have that's running at that time thats doing it. Closing tasks 1 by 1 and testing, or excluding from windows startup and testing will lead you to the culprit software.

Dana,

Thank you for the tip! I found out that I can't connect to any of the audio streams that come from AOL. They are of the format:

http://scfire-ntc-aa04.stream.aol.com:80/stream/1075

There are a lot of them which is why this happens to me so frequently. I can't connect to them through Windows Media player either so this is a problem on my computer. Strangely all of the other computers in my house can connect to these streams with no problem. The only difference between them is that this is a Windows Vista computer.

But there still seems to be a bug in Second Life. Just because one audio stream connection is broken shouldn't require a restart of Second Life to get audio working again.

I guess I will have to figure out why this is happening. Thanks again for your tip. It sent me in the right direction.

Mandrake Nitely

Solution found!

It turns out this is a problem caused by BitDefender's Privacy Control. It was enabled with no rules in the ruleset. So I'm sure I'm not the only person having this problem. I will have to take it up directly with BitDefender.

After I disabled Privacy Control these url's worked perfectly.

Thanks again,

Mandrake Nitely

This is a known issue.

According to Weedy, attempting to connect to a URL which is no longer valid, returns a DNS error which "bugs" the Windows codec on your PC. You may notice this only occurs when DNS forwarding a domain name, as opposed to using a specific IP and port.

When this happens, relogging is the only solution.

Other than group/deed settings, it's one of her most common customer service issues.

Dave,

I was curious about what you said so I tested using this URL:

http://207.200.96.138:80/stream/1075

Notice I used the IP address instead of the domain. I turned my privacy settings back on so that this URL would appear broken.

I still had to relog Second Life in order to get the sound working again. So I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you or not but it appears to happen for IP-based URLs as well.

Thanks for letting me know this is a codec issue and is already acknowledged by Second Life.

The address used here, still requires DNS forwarding through port 80

An address such as this http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxxx requires no DNS forwarding