Radio troubleshooting: silence, skipping and drops
Diagnose a station that is silent, stuttering, or refusing encoders.
Most radio problems are one of four things. Here is how to tell which.
The stream is silent / not "live"
Is the encoder connected? The panel shows whether the mount has a live source. If not, the problem is on the encoder side — wrong password, wrong port, or the app failed silently.
Correct mount? A source connected to
/livewill not appear on/stream.Correct password? Re-copy it; trailing spaces are a classic.
Firewall? The source port must be reachable from the encoder's network.
It stutters or buffers
Buffering is almost always bandwidth or listener load, not the audio:
Check concurrent listeners against your cap.
Check the server's outbound bandwidth — are you saturating it?
Check CPU: encoding happens on the encoder; serving is cheap, but a struggling VPS will still drop connections.
On the listener side, a slow connection stutters on 256 kbps that is smooth on 128. Offer a lower-bitrate mount.
See Bandwidth vs CPU bottlenecks.
Listeners disconnect at the same time every day
Contact your provider about a network pattern or a scheduled job on the server (backup, log rotation) saturating resources. Check the server's resource graphs around that time.
AutoDJ not resuming
Confirm AutoDJ is enabled and has tracks in its playlist.
Check the schedule actually covers the current hour.
Look for corrupt audio files that make the player skip repeatedly — remove and re-upload them.
Metadata is wrong or missing
The encoder is not sending ICY metadata, or it is sending it in an unsupported format. Check the encoder's "update title" / "song info" setting is on and points at your media player's now-playing field.
Getting help fast
When opening a ticket, include: the mount name, the listener count, the encoder app, and the exact behaviour (silent / buffering / disconnects at 14:00 daily). That turns a guessing game into a fix.
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