Live #15 & the Future of ShoutCast

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The next Gensokyo Radio Live show, Live #15, will be playing on Friday, December 6th, 2013 at 4pm PST / 7pm EST / Midnight UTC (Saturday, December 7th). This will be the last live show for the year 2013, so come one down and chat with fellow listeners, learn more about what we have planned for 2014, and of course, listen to some great music!

Just to update everyone with the shirt pre-order, we’ve submit the final proof to the shirt company, and they’ll have our order ready to go next week. We’re scheduled to receive the shirts within the first few days of December, so our goal is to have them packaged and shipped out by the 6th, same day as the live show.

We also sent out emails to everyone who pre-ordered a shirt explaining the design change we had to make for the shirt company to be able to print our design. More details are on the shop page.

In other news, AOL made an announcement that Winamp will be shutting down next month, on December 20th, 2013. There are some rumors that another company such as Microsoft might buy it from them to keep it around (or possibly to change it forever, who knows really), but that’s just speculation at this point. If Winamp does go completely dark, their website and all of their related web services would go down. This also includes ShoutCast, the system that Gensokyo Radio uses to stream for the station.

What the exact consequences of this potential eventuality are are presently unclear. If ShoutCast goes down, the best case scenario is that their services are no longer present, and when our server goes to list on their public station listings, known as “yellow pages” or YP, it ignores any communications errors it gets, along with ignoring potential errors from the mp3 license or server hash connections that the server makes as well, and the station keeps going like nothing happened. Worst case scenario is that everything breaks, ShoutCast becomes unusable, and we need to find a different solution.

No matter what happens with ShoutCast, we will continue to stream the sounds to our listeners, even if that means changing the services we use to do so. We just want everyone to be aware that, should things break on or after December 20th, it may take some time to put things back together. We’ll continue to monitor things and discuss our options as news happens.

Don’t forget, Live #15 on Friday, December 6th/7th! Thanks for listening! ~

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User Comments (migrated from legacy news system)

Mamizou | Posted on November 24th, 2013, 10:35:34 PM
Outside of the station listings, I’m surprised you don’t already use Icecast. (low bitrate opus stream plzkthx)

LunarSpotlight | Posted on November 25th, 2013, 12:18:33 AM
There was a time when Auritribe switched from using Shoutcast to Icecast. Listener numbers went from around 15 to 2. Shoutcast has been a pretty solid platform for us to be on.

Mamizou | Posted on November 25th, 2013, 01:06:04 AM
That’s weird. They’re intercompatible, for the most part (although Icecast supports more codecs). Maybe the mount points changed and no one downloaded a new playlist file.

Khoury | Posted on November 25th, 2013, 07:22:22 PM
I don’t see a problem with Icecast, being open-source is a step in the right direction. Like Mamizou said, more codecs are available; this would open the door to multiple stream bitrates I.E. 96k mp3 for users with limited hardware and mobile devices or even a 400k+ FLAC stream for hardcore audiophiles. But that’s just my two cents.

LunarSpotlight | Posted on November 25th, 2013, 08:21:19 PM
We could do multiple bitrate streams as it is right now if we wanted, but I’d have to change some things around to do that. I can’t help but feel there’s a lot more work to be done.

TrollingKiwi | Posted on November 27th, 2013, 03:33:25 AM
Just curious but I have a question: if you did change from ShoutCast to IceCast…would that affect the links to this station in apps like, for example, Anime Radio on the Google Play Store? I mean, I discovered Gensokyo radio through that app. If that were to be affected then some other potential listener may simply decide to change the station and ignore it completely if he experiences problems with this station while using the app. I know I would have. Thank god I didn’t though :). It’s been great these past few months :smiley:

LunarSpotlight | Posted on November 27th, 2013, 08:48:20 AM
When we changed servers last year to increase listener capacity, the server address (link) also changed, and we didn’t see any listeners from that app for a while, but eventually we were back on there. We posted about the change on twitter, someone even made a post about it on reddit, and eventually things were back to normal. If it happens again where the link to the station changes, we could probably just contact the people behind the app directly to let them know. It’d be quicker that way.

xfullmetal17 | Posted on November 28th, 2013, 07:14:08 AM
As a suggestion, perhaps have every so often a sort of “PSA” on the stream about ShoutCast possibly going down on the radio stream, and to check the website for more details if it does take down this station with it.

TrollingKiwi | Posted on November 30th, 2013, 06:59:57 PM
@LunarSpotlight Oh I see. Yes, I actually remember that period when the link on the app was down for a while. Well, if it is possible to contact the app managers about the change in the link if it ever does occur, then I don’t see a problem with the change. It would be a very quick and efficient way to deal with the problem. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.

LunarSpotlight | Posted on December 4th, 2013, 09:12:07 PM
Apparently DrO, one of the main people on the Winamp Forums who works with ShoutCast quite a bit, said that ShoutCast was safe in the Winamp outage happening in a couple weeks. If that’s true, that’s good news for us. It means there’s (almost) nothing to worry about. It still takes out the yellow pages I think though, so we’ll see what happens.