Banshee never connects to a radio stream on the first try

Question

I have 17 different radio streams. I'd like to be able to use the alarm extension so I could wake up to one of them playing.

However, I can't do this because Banshee (2.2 daily build) never, and I do mean never, connects to any of them on the first try.

If I click to play any radio stream, on the first try it says "Contacting...", and then it says "Idle", and a little X mark appears beside the name of the station.

However, if I click it a second time, it works fine.

It always goes like this. Without fail. I can never connect on the first try, and I can almost always connect on the second try.

I don't know how close together the two tries have to be in order to work.

What I do know, though, is if I use the Alarm extension to start playing a radio stream in the morning, nothing happens in the morning because it attempts to connect and then fails and gives up trying.

Any advice on how to solve this would be appreciated.

See also:

• A thread for this question on the Banshee mailing list
• A bug report with debug output from Banshee

Answer 1

I have encountered this problem in Banshee as well. I also use the daily builds (as of this past week or so again) - and in my experience it seems to mainly occur in the daily builds and not in the Stable release.

My guess to the cause

To my knowledge there is no real "fix" that you can apply, because it seems to be both a problem in Banshee and in the radio stations themselves. When I was still on Windows, this also used to happen with some radio stations. It seems to be a server side issue (partially), in that when you first try to connect, it fails and thus the music player marks it as unavailable (hence the x).

On the other hand, once the music player is told to try again, it finds the station - apparently after the server allots "space" to your player (that's just my guess).

The real answer:

I would suggest you simply wait on a fix from the Banshee developers, which will probably include having the player retry the station a few times. It is very unlikely that there is anything you can do on your end.

You could also try the stable build of Banshee, which seems to do better in this situation.

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Alternate solution:

Another option may be to use another player, such as Clementine (for example), which may be able to play the station even if it reports itself as down at first (I have not tried this). You could use either a cron job or a timer application (there are numerous timer apps available) for the alarm functionality.