Want to listen to Zappa 24/7? Here it is! The stream's up all day. Just click on the playback button and get the party started!

09.06.2021: Stream Failure

Early this morning all streams stopped. I restarted them later, but the mp3 stream would not come up. The uplink software crashed after running one or two seconds. Took me until the evening to get it fixed. Sorry for the down time. I have no idea why this just started, there were no changes made to the server at all.

10.05.2021: Updated Feed Software

The feed was not very reliable, the streams went offline once or twice a week. I also had the problem that it did not preserve the peak listener count, so I could not see how many people use the streams. I also had the feeling that some clients would get kicked out after each song. Not a pleasant listening experience. The only problem is that the new software does not support AAC+, so i replaced the stream with OGG. The AAC stream (based on the old uplink software) will be around for some time, still, until I see the usage count go down. It will be turned off once it is no longer required.

29.09.2020: Updated Proxy Code

The Icecast server runs on port 8000 which is blocked by many corporate firewalls. It is therefore proxied to http (and https as well). Seems that the method used caused problems. I updated that code, now it is a 1:1 copy of what is sent out by Icecast. Hope that the lags and client drops are gone now. Please be so kind and drop me a note about the outcome. Does it work now? Did it work for you before? Has it gotten better? I'd really like to know, because with my clients I never had any problems.

BTW, I also updated the VLC playlists for AAC+ and FLAC, seems that they actually were Microsoft Media Player scripts, not PLS format...

23.09.2020: Uplink code updated

The uplink code has been changed to tolerate source file problems better. The stream might still hiccup on source file defects but not quit like several times the last weeks. Hope the stream failures will not happen anymore.

23.08.2020: Song title display is back

The song title display is back. The currently playing song will also be sent out as metadata with the Icecast stream so it can be displayed within your player.

Hope the troubles are gone for good now!

23.08.2020: Service now running Icecast2

Because the problems with the Shoutcast server software became bigger and bigger, the stream has been moved to Icecast2, finally. Actually I would have liked to do that years ago already, but could not find time and was not really keen on that. As long as it was working it was OK.

Anyway, now that step has finally been done and the stream should now be stable and reliable again!

The stream is reachable at the well-known addresses, and as a nice goodie, there is a new lossless FLAC encoded stream! Enjoy the not recoded quality. These are the original files directly from disk.

streams.norbert.de:8000/zappa.aac
streams.norbert.de:8000/zappa.mp3
streams.norbert.de:8000/zappa.flac

Currently the marquee that displayed the currently running song is out of order, but will return as soon as possible. But I guess that's a minor problem, isn't it?

22.08.2020: Switched to Icecast2!

Icecast is finally up and running. Currently both AAC and MP3 are available again, and hopefully, as reliant as to be expected! There will be some outages though, work is still in progress, but it that will be done soon.

22.08.2020: Server software problems

There are intermittent drop outs which I blamed on my faulty internet connection. So I moved some files to the server and uplinked locally, and replaced the link hardware. This did not help, though. I think there are problems with the Shoutcast server. I already tried to upgrade to the latest version as of April 2020, but that made things even worse. No AAC stream, very strange.

I will switch to Icecast, but this will take some time.

Update 22.08.2020: OK, got it... V2.5.5.733 is the October 2017 version that is now running.

For some reason it causes lags occasionally, stopping and continueing. Alas, I cannot go to v2.6.0.753 as of April 2020 which is the latest version.

I do not know if it heals the dropouts in the first place as its useless - Radionomy dropped AAC support for the Freemium subscription. This is why the new version would not start the AAC stream ([Licence sid=1] Format is not MP3, where only MP3 is allowed).

They want make money. Anyways, I am not willing to pay for a badly supported, buggy software and deliver myself up to a despotic company not listening to customers. I don't know how many times the Shoutcast Server caused me headaches the last ten years or so.

So Icecast will be coming, soon. Very soon!

My recommendation for software like this has been given by Zappa himseld: "I'm gonna ram it, ram it, ram it ram it up your poop chute"

2nd update 22.08.2020: Good news! I've got the Icecast2 server running on a test machine. I hope to roll it out to the public tonight so we can have the best listening expierience tomorrow.

As a goodie I will also be able to provide a lossless FLAC stream additionally to the traditional AAC and MP3!

Zappacheers!

20.08.2020: Uplink problems

As if the demise of the Zappateers home site was not enough, now the Zappa stream is also going crazy. I suppose the uplink internet connection is faulty. There is a lot of packet loss which presumably is the reason for the stream outages.

New hardware is already ordered and should arrive this week. Please be patient and stay tuned!

Murphy had no idea. "Everything that can go wrong will go wrong."

Haha. I say: "Everything that cannot go wrong will also go wrong." :)

Update 21.08.2020: Moved the uplink to the server that does the stream. That means the packet loss problems on the other connection no longer matter, but due to limited disk space I cannot provide all recordings I have. I suppose this is much better than hot air out of the stream every now and then.

Update 22.08.2020: That did not help. The stream still fails. I am preparing to replace the Shoutcast Server software with Icecast. Looks like Shoutcast is missing out on proper quality assurance. Hope to have it up soon.

25.06.2019: Uplink was down

Sorry folks, the uplink server was down for two days due to a hard drive failure. Now it's replaced and the link is operational again. I replaced the oldie mechanical thing with a solid state drive, so I guess this one will not go down.

24.02.2019: Offering streams now as https

All streams can be accessed now via https protocol. This may seem unnecessary as the stream is publically available anyway, but as browsers gradually begin to demonise unencrypted connections this may be useful at some point in time and won't hurt until then.
https://shoutcast.norbert.de/zappa.aac?type=http
https://shoutcast.norbert.de/zappa.aac?type=sc1
https://shoutcast.norbert.de/zappa.aac?type=sc2
https://shoutcast.norbert.de/zappa.aac?type=.flv

https://shoutcast.norbert.de/zappa.mp3?type=http
https://shoutcast.norbert.de/zappa.mp3?type=sc1
https://shoutcast.norbert.de/zappa.mp3?type=sc2
https://shoutcast.norbert.de/zappa.mp3?type=.flv

04.08.2018: Upgraded embedded stream to AAC

The embedded player on this page was running the 128K MPEG stream. Until now... I just upgraded it to the 256K AAC. All modern browsers support AAC now so it's time for that change. The sound quality is far better.

25.07.2018: Moved To New Server

The machine this site and the streams were running on was becoming of age. So now everything has been moved to a new, more powerful server. Hope the transition went smoothly... We'll see.

07.11.2017: Server Update Once Again

The guys who develop shoutcast are becoming quite rude when they release a new version and I don't upgrade fast enough. So now we got SHOUTcast Server v2.5.5.733/posix(linux x64) running.

Info 08.09.2017: Server Update Again

The server software has been updated again to SHOUTcast Server v2.5.5.732/posix(linux x64). I would not want to do it but the developers made it urgent for some reason.

Info 10.03.2017: Server Update

The server software has been updated to the latest version, SHOUTcast Server v2.5.1.724. Hope there are no issues...

Info 04.01.2016: No sound under Linux with Firefox

It turned out that after some update of Firefox, the HTML5 player stopped working.

Here's a fix:

wf212 2015-05-15 00:56:18 PDT

We saw from Gingerbread Man's comments that there is a connection to the 
gstreamer library. I find two switches in my preferences (about:config) 
pertaining to gstreamer: media.gstreamer.enabled and 
media.gstreamer.enable-blacklist. Both are "true" by default. If I set 
the latter to "false", everything works fine for me!

Source: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1153754

Info 28.12.2015: Links for tuning in with internet radios

It seems that some of you can no longer listen to the stream with their internet radios. Maybe the station list needs to be updated, until then maybe the direct links may help to tune in manually (see left column).

HTH

Info 28.12.2015: Moved to new hardware

The server (that runs the Zappa Streams besides of other sites) has been moved to new hardware. Unfortunately outages could not be avoided. Firstly all PLS/ASX files became outdated and had to be redownloaded. Alas, because of a forgotten configuration change some links on the left column no longer worked. The embedded player also stopped working. Very embarrassing, I am sorry!

Please reactivate playback by clicking on one of the links. From now on they are set up to sustain the next server update.

The new server is more powerful and should be able to support higher numbers of listeners,

Info 14.12.2015: Update to SHOUTcast Server v2.4.7.256

Because of problems with the directory listing, the streaming server has been updated to the latest available SHOUTcast Server v2.4.7.256. I hope this will not cause any issues. If there is anything wrong, please report to me: me.

If you are using a stream ripper, it seems that the new server software blocks them. Actually I have nothing against stream rippers, but I don't know how to disable the lock on these by the server. As the stream is lossy, it is a better idea to rather go to http://www.zappateers.com/ and download the source files using the tracker.

Info 05.09.2014: Server downgrade

The new Shoutcast Stream Server caused a lot of trouble, including that the stream suddenly was not listed in the directory, so it has been downgraded back to SHOUTcast Server v2.2.1.109/posix(linux x64).

Info 28.08.2014: Server update

The Shoutcast Stream Server has been updated to SHOUTcast Server v2.2.2.123/posix(linux x64).

Info 14.05.2014: Embedded player and Android link (Update)

The embedded player turned out to be more work than planned. Each browser, even the same browser on different operating systems, has different capabilities. I had to create a browser list and what they support, then add a detection and have the site adopt to that.

Seems to be OK now - if there are still problems, please notify me.

You can go to the test page and check the results. Please make a note of the user agent string and which of the three tests work (HTML5, Flash and the title info). Send the result to me if you are not using one of the browsers already in following list. Of course only if your browser does not play Zappa from this page.

Info 11.05.2014: Embedded player and Android link

Yesterday I horror-strickenly noticed that none of the links effectively started Zappa music on my tablet (under Android). So I created a link, but much to my dismay this rascal only worked with Firefox and Video Lan Client, both had to be installed separately.

So now I added an embedded player which supports the full range: Windoze, Android, Linux and even MacOS. It needs Flash, but that should not be a problem, I hope.

Addendum 12.05.2014:

For all operating systems besides of Android HTML5 is now used. HTML5 streaming does not work with Android Stock Browser, because the Http 1.1 protocol is not fully implemented. A Muse Flash player is used instead.

Info 10.05.2014: Server update

The Shoutcast Stream Server has been updated to SHOUTcast Server v2.2.1.109/posix(linux x64).

Info 09.05.2014: About the playlists

The play order is defined by a playlist. Each Sunday at 20:00 the list is restarted.

The Zappateers listening session is played first, followed by the session of last week.

Then concerts are picked in shuffled order from 450 recordings, otherwise some concerts would never be aired. Thus concerts are never in the same order each new week.

During the week no concert is repeated. Only both listening sessions may be repeated (but not necessarily). Of course all 450 concerts are never playing during the week.

Info 06.05.2014: Many "new" concerts

Many concerts that existed in mp3 format which were taken off line for quite a while have been replaced with the original FLAC version now. That was quite some work, to restore them from backup and put them into the playlists.

It was worth it - now over 400 concert recordings from 1966 to 1992 are online. Besides of 8 shows of which I lost the FLAC sources (only the mp3 format files remain), they are all available in best possible quality.

Of course, keep on mind, that most concerts were taped with a cassette player and some small microphone. All exceptions are marked SBD (directly from soundboard device), FM (radio sourced) or stage recording (microphones directly somewhere on stage).

So please do not expect miracles :)

From Sunday, 11th of May 2014, after the rerun at 20:00 the new playlist will start.

Info 06.05.2014: Net segment block removed

The amazon net segment block has been removed. After some software updates there is hope the problem is gone. And that the party poopers won't find new tricks to disrupt the stream.

Info 06.11.2013: Stream interruptions

Hi folks!

A new attack wave hit the server - there were lots of unauthorised attempts to broadcast through my server. None of these attempts succeeded, as noone guessed the right password. Alas, all these futile tries to access it caused it to shut down several times.

To fix that problem, only local sources are allowed now. So these people are locked out and I hope that the server will not unadvertedly shutdown anymore.

By the way, guess from where 95% of the attacks came. I had one from Germany, Sweden, China, but the winner is... USA. There were hundreds of invalid password accesses from there.

Update

The crashes continued. Seems that someone is sending invalid requests to the server, causing it to crash. Happened three times just this morning from 9.00 AM to 11:30 AM. All these attacks came from one net segment in the US:

ec2-54-251-166-107.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com
ec2-54-254-180-136.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com
ec2-54-254-193-106.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com
ec2-54-254-193-124.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com
ec2-54-254-194-16.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com
ec2-54-254-194-28.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com
ec2-54-254-195-19.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com
ec2-54-254-195-37.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com
ec2-54-254-195-223.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com
ec2-54-254-195-172.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com

This segment belongs to Amazon (a whois brings this up):

Amazon Technologies Inc. AMAZON-2011L (NET-54-240-0-0-1) 54.240.0.0 - 54.255.255.255

So now I blocked the whole net segment from accessing the services. Bye-bye!

Info 13.05.2013: Stream up again

Hiho rockstars!

Yesterday morning around 8:00 CET I had to turn off the stream because it ate the whole CPU power available, causing email, web services and else to stop working.

I am not really sure as to why this happened, but I suppose the number of streaming files got too large. Therefore I reduced the list and now the stream is up again, without excessive ressource usage.

As a side effect now only FLAC (lossless) sourced files get streamed, this may improve the sound quality a bit. At least it won't hurt.

Info 18.06.2012: Repeated Session #525, fixed hacker problems

Hi Folks,

I am sorry - yesterday I have setup up the concert but forgot to reload the playlist. Thus session #525 was repeated. From this week on I will do it right, I promise.

And for the killed stream: I found the villain, the attacks came from an IP in Taiwan. I have locked it out with my firewall - no crashes anymore. I just hope he does not change his IP...

Info 15.06.2012: Hacker Attacks

You won't believe what kind of morons exist: Obviously yet again a problem in shoutcast server was discovered, allowing unauthorised persons to kill the stream. Happened yesterday at 16:43 and this morning at 5:52. Subsequently both streams were no longer available.

As a counter measure I added a check which fixes the problem after less than 60 seconds. Thus the stream can only vanish for max. one minute.

I do not know what these idiots get out of that, but stopping the stream won't be of much use in the future.

Info 25.03.2012: German Translation

I have added a German translation of this page, and a check which language your browser requests. I hope the page comes up in the right language now - English by default or German on German systems.

Info 23.03.2012: Windows Media Player Link

It seems it was quite futile to click on the links with only Windows Media Player installed - it does not recognise listen.pls files. So I have now provided extra links for it, sending out ASX files it understands.

Info 23.03.2012: IPv6 Support

Just for testing and the fun of it, I have enabled the streams with IPv6. If you haven't got IPv6, of course, it won't work.

Please note that you can only get the IPv6 streams when you access the listen.pls files I supplied via the links. The ones sent by DNAS will simply point you back to the regular IPv4 address. DNAS is not IPv6 capable as of yet, I quite honestly mapped the stream from IPv4 to 6 using a "stone" instance. 

I tested the streams, VideoLAN and Windows Media Player work fine. WinAmp does not support IPv6. Under Linux, use VideoLAN or Amarok. Other players may work, but are untested.

Info 20.03.2012: DNAS Update

After the update to SHOUTcast Server v2.0.0.29/posix(linux x64), it did no longer accept the new AAC source files I created since I added the AAC+ stream. I had to replace them with FLAC encoded files.

This was some extra work, but as this format is losless, the only degrade goes to the AAC or MP3 encoding for the stream. Therefore I hope this ensures the best possible quality. This is also only possible because the new server has more harddrive capacity than the old one.

Info 16.03.2012: New Server

The streams and the web pages have moved to a new machine. Also, the streaming server software has been updated. The old version tended to crash every now and then.

While I was at it, I also updated the landing page and added it to my CMS to have a more streamlined layout.

What's not changed: it's here for you to enjoy!

Info 18.07.2011: MP3 Back Online

I was informed that some people could not listen to the new AAC stream, especially using mobile devices. So now I have set up a second stream at 128 KBit, using MP3 compression.

Info 06.07.2011: AAC+ Stream

It seems that some people have an inapprehensible aversion to Zappa, or a profound aversion to me. Anyway, someone kept attacking the stream resulting in regular drops of the input stream, subsequently bringing down the whole stream.

So now I did what I already had in mind for quite a while: I upgraded the stream to AAC (using the newer Shoutcast 2.x server). This should give us two advantages:

• No more source drops (hopefully...)
• Better stream quality at the same bitrate (AAC has a far better sound quality as compared to MP3)

Normally all modern clients should be able to handle the AAC Format. I checked Winamp and VLC, both played the stream immediately.

Info 09.03.2010: Bandwidth Upgrade

Due to bandwith shortage, the stream experienced problems during the last weeks of February 2010, if the number of listeners went above 60. After a bandwidth upgrade, the stream is now back up at 320 KBit and supports up to 250 listeners.