Bob the Engineer's Help

If you have a slow or heavily congested Internet connection, you may experience skipping in your Jester Radio stream. This is usually caused by a buffer underrun condition; that's when the data is streaming to your MP3 player faster than it's coming from the 'Net. To fix it, you need to increase the buffer.

Here are the instructions for adjusting the streaming MP3 buffer in Nullsoft's Winamp player. If you're using a different player, check the documentation for the proper procedure.

First, open the Winamp Preferences dialog by right-clicking the gold lightning bolt in the lower, right corner of Winamp's main window and selecting Options | Preferences from the pop-up menu, or by pressing CTRL-P when the main Winamp window is active.

In the left pane of the Preferences dialog, under Plug-ins, select Input. In the right pane, find the Nullsoft MPEG audio decoder plug-in (your exact version number may be different than ours), select it and click the Configure button. That'll open the MPEG audio decoder settings dialog. Click the Streaming tab at the top of the dialog.

The first thing you should do is increase the Streaming Data Buffer. The default value of 64 KB just isn't enough to compensate for dial-up connections or high traffic areas. We recommend increasing this value in increments of 16KB (i.e., 80K, 96K, 112K, or 128K) until skipping disappears. We do not recommend values over 256K.

The Streaming Prebuffer settings control how much of the buffer to fill at the start of a stream or after a buffer underrun. If you experience interruptions in the stream shortly after play begins, increase the top slider. Use the bottom slider to increase the buffer after there has been a disruption in the stream.