VST Plugins

There are many VST plugins that have been ported to BeOS. Unfortunately some VST plugins are of extremely poor quality, and will either crash SoundPlay on startup, will crash SoundPlay when you try to deactivate them after opening their configuration panel, or will just crash randomly. These are not bugs in SoundPlay. Please do not report them as such.
Some plugins that are known to crash SoundPlay on startup are: "mda Combo" and "mda Shepard". You should not install these VST plugins, or SoundPlay will not start up anymore.
Some plugins that will crash SoundPlay after opening their configuration panels: DualDelay, Hexaline and NastyShaper. If you activate these plugins, you can only deactivate them again if you do not first open their configuration panel.

Ogg Vorbis streaming

SoundPlay supports streaming Ogg Vorbis, both as a server (through the LiveEncoder plugin) and as a client. There are some things to take note of when you want to stream Ogg Vorbis.

On the server side, you need to install the "oggenc" commandline Ogg Vorbis encoder. You can find it here. You then need to select Ogg Vorbis output in the LiveEncoder plugin, and restart the LiveEncoder server. Note that Ogg Vorbis is a variable bitrate format, and oggenc will not give you exactly the bitrate you specify. In particular, for the 22 kHz formats, the actual bitrate will be much higher than what you select. Also, streaming total silence is a bad idea; the bitrate will drop dramatically, and clients will take a long time to connect. Finally, oggenc is pretty cpu-hungry, especially at higher bitrates. If you have a relatively slow machine, try the lower bitrates.

On the client side, you need to append something with a .ogg extension to the URL, otherwise the mp3 decoder will be selected to decode the stream. For example, if the server oggserver.yourdomain.com is set up to server an Ogg Vorbis stream on port 8000, clients would connect using the URL http://oggserver.yourdomain.com:8000/bla.ogg

Note that you can run multiple instances of LiveEncoder, each on their own port, allowing you to serve multiple streams at different bitrates, or even mix mp3 and Ogg Vorbis streaming.

Title streaming

SoundPlay supports getting track-info for mp3 streams, sometimes referred to as "title streaming". It supports both the in-stream and seperate-stream UDP protocols. The in-stream protocol is old, clunky, and unfortunately more likely to be supported by whatever server you're connecting to. The UDP protocol is more elegant, but is not supported by NullSoft's ShoutCast server. If you are connecting only to Icecast servers, you can use the UDP protocol, otherwise you should leave the UDP option disabled. If you hear lots of glitches in the sound when title-streaming is enabled, the server is sending incorrect title-info, and you should disable titlestreaming and reconnect.

SoundPlay does not currently support sending track-info when used as a server using the LiveEncoder plugin. This is planned for a future release.

Reporting bugs

If you report a bug, please mention all relevant details. For example: Send bugreports to marcone@xs4all.nl