alexa connects to my raido station then very quickly disconnects

[dccircuit]

Thanks for working on this, although with an Echo, 4 Dots and 2 Google Homes running I get mixed results on both iHeart and Tunein for your stations. Google Homes cannot find them.  Dots can on iHeart and Tunein but sometimes when I stop the playing it takes a while for these stations to disconnect.  Then, I cannot play known stations and need to unplug the Dots to reset them so they work right again.

I'm not familiar with the Google Home, so I guess I'm not surprised that it doesn't work... Does it use similar "skills/apps" to the Echo/Dot?  Does it have a skill for either iHeart or TuneIn?  I'll look around for information on this, but feel free to point me to an online resource for radio stations if you know of one.

The difficulty with disconnecting is unusual... Our streams are not special... They are AAC streams (which give better sound quality than mp3 for the same bandwidth), and the come from the streaming provider Triton Digital.  Both iHeart and TuneIn link directly to them.  Perhaps the change from iHeart going from our HLS stream to our AAC stream was not immediate... But at least when you listen on your Dot, the stream isn't cutting out after a minute or so, correct?

[dccircuit]

Hello, everyone.  I work for WXXI/WRUR and we found out from iHeartRadio that there's an incompatibility problem between our streaming provider's HLS formatted streams and their Amazon app.  So, they've switched to using one of our other stream formats until our streaming provider's HLS streams work better with their app.  Can you give these stations a try again (through the iHeart app) and see if they stay online longer?  Thanks for discussing this here and thanks to the person who sent us a link to this forum.

I'm still having the same problem. I'm not sure what you mean by the Amazon app. Perhaps you mean a "skill," the name Amazon gives to apps on Echo. But this behavior occurs on the stock Amazon echo (an Echo Dot, in my case), without any special iheartradio app.

Yes, I definitely mean skill... So, we only recently got added to iHeartRadio (like less than a month ago).  We've been on TuneIn for a long time.  I believe the iHeart and TuneIn radio skills are pre-installed on the Echo/Dot.  (I could be wrong, though).  Apparently, iHeart is looked at first when trying to stream radio stations, so people who used to just say something like "play WXXI" would get the TuneIn experience... But when iHeart got our station, now it uses the iHeart experience which appears to be the problem.  Try something like "listen to wxxi am 1370 on TuneIn Radio" and see if that works more consistently.

[mike27oct]

FYI,  the Googhe Home internet radio experience works just like Alexa, ie, ask it to play a station and it does.  GH appears to default to iHeart, so it only plays from Tunein when specified.

[dccircuit]

FYI,  the Googhe Home internet radio experience works just like Alexa, ie, ask it to play a station and it does.  GH appears to default to iHeart, so it only plays from Tunein when specified.

It's possible that the Google Device requires the HLS formatted stream (which we just disabled) -- I understand that Playstations and Google Chromecast require HLS, so maybe Google Home is in the same boat?  Can you confirm that you can't get WXXI AM 1370 even if you ask Google Home to to use TuneIn?  Thanks.

[mike27oct]

OK, results of asking Google Home to:

play WXXI on Tunein:  it played most times, a few times it could not find it
play WXXI on lHeart: played it every time

I asked GH to play WRUR on Tunein and iHeart services and both said they could not find it.

[dccircuit]

OK, results of asking Google Home to:

play WXXI on Tunein:  it played most times, a few times it could not find it
play WXXI on lHeart: played it every time

I asked GH to play WRUR on Tunein and iHeart services and both said they could not find it.

Okay, interesting.  Thanks.

[malliekm]

I was able to play wxxi on TuneIn.

[malliekm]

I was able to play WRUR on iHeart Radio the other day but couldn't play the station on either radio tonight.