A quick fix for Internet Radio stream skippings

Nothing can be more frustrating than to listen to some great tune on Internet Radio which suddenly starts to skip ruining all the fun. The following, pretty obvious method, helps most of the time if you regularly experience stutters, slowdowns or skippings when listening to Internet Radio.

It is most likely that the buffer size is not large enough and therefor needs to be increased. This buffer pre-saves part of the stream which will be used when the connection speed drops. You should now that the connection is never a constant one but varies more or less depending on a handful of factors.

The buffer is therefor mainly used as a counterweight. Here are the ways to increase the buffer size in XMPlay and Winamp.

You right-click the main window of XMPlay and select Options and Stuff from the menu. The Miscellaneous menu has a entry called Internet Streaming, a slider with a default value of 8s. You might need to experiment a little bit with the settings but raising to 10 to 15 seconds should be more than enough normally.

Right-click the main Winamp window as well and select Options > Preferences from the menu. Select Output > Plugins in the menu and click on configure after choosing a plugin from the list. The default plugin is Nullsoft Directsound Output.

Click on the Buffering tab in the new window and adjust the settings. The default values are 2000ms Buffer Lenght, 500ms for Prebuffer and on Buffer-Ahead. Max values are 20000ms which is a lot. I would start by adding 1000ms and testing that setting. Add another 1000ms if the music is still skipping.