Help with digital "chirps" in internet radio station stream
Hello,
I was trying to find an email address for Spectrum support to send this to, but all I could find was a phone number to call or a chat option. I'm hoping this will be seen by the right people in Spectrum support and I can get some help with this issue.
I have an internet radio station that is streaming from my house. When I listen to the stream of the station, I hear these digital "chirps" at random points in the stream. I captured a couple audio samples where you can hear it.
In this one, you can hear them at around :04, :10, and :15 -
In this one, you can hear them at :06 and :29 -
I know the noise isn't part of the audio files themselves because it's not there when I listen to the files.
I use a service called Live365 to provide my stream, so I reached out to their support team to see if they could solve the issue. They had me run an application called PingPlotter to look for issues in the network. This is the screenshot of the results of that tool:
(Based on the warning at the top of this screen, I blacked out the IP addresses. If you need to see those, I can send you the original version)
Based on that screenshot, the Live365 support person said it showed packet loss on line 4, 7 & 8, before it reaches their servers (line 13 &14).
Now I'm hoping to figure out if there's something that Spectrum can do to solve this issue so that my stream sounds nice and clean. If someone from Spectrum support could help, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
Best Answer
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Hi @jdeboer79, welcome to our community!
I can't think of any reason the internet would cause a chirp in the audio, unless it's a quirk of Live365 during internet loss. I don't see any issues with your traceroute, you made it to the destination server in good time with no dropped packets so any ping responses from individual hops along the way are irrelevant. I recommend running a continuous ping test by opening your command prompt (Press Windows+R, type "cmd", press OK), and use the command "ping -t ingest.live365.com". The -t will keep it running until you use Ctrl+C to get your final results, but just leave it running while you stream. If connection issues were the cause of this I would expect to see dropped or delayed packets at the same time.
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Answers
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Could maybe look into what transfer protocol is being used and whether that may be changed.
TCP has various features in play to help the packets arrive properly (flow control, error correction, fast retransmit, etc.)
UDP sacrifices such features for less overhead to move more data... but the trade off may cause more out-of-order or flat-out nondelivery at the endpoint.
(Would note the same choices may be made for VPN's as well)
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Here are the results of the ping test. I ran it for about an hour or so, and actually heard the "chirps" in the stream while it was running. But it's showing no packet loss. I'm not sure what else could be causing it.
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Follow-up... Live365 had to "reload the Mount ID" (whatever that means) and it seems to have solved the issue. So it's all good now.
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