Unreal Media Server

[tommybcool]

Hello Admin,
The staff at UM techsupport accessed my mp3 files and found them all normal. They suggested I had a third party software causing this issue. No mp3 will play via Streaming Media Player without buffering and showing 172 kBytes/sec audio bitrate (you thought it should be 16 kBytes/s). So I decided to try the files on a different PC, in a different Media Server installation. The same issue occurs. A standard mp3 from my playlist shows PCM and 172kByts/s bitrate even thought this is a totally different installation. The thing both PCs have in common is Win2kPro, an old version of Musicmatch and V5 media and live servers. I know this used to work on V4 without buffering. What could be causing this? Mp3's stream fine using other software, and wmv's don't buffer from Media server like mp3's do.
I even tried reinstalling Media Server to no avail.

[tommybcool]

I also convert the files to .wma and they play fine, no buffer and the bitrate shows 16kByte/s. But if it's an mp3 it indicates it's a PCM file.

[tommybcool]

I found this buffering problem happening on two different PCs with different configurations (one for home, another for an office). Umedia support suggested I had some third party software affecting the identity of the mp3 file.
Turns out both of the PCs had the Ares file sharing software from Sorceforge installed. Today I uninstalled Ares on one of the PCs, played an mp3 with SMP and the audio bitrate is finally normal. Not sure why Ares would do this.