Overnight on Friday, our music stream server provider moved the station server to a new machine, while maintaining the former named address, but changing the former IP address to a new one.

You can always listen using the http://listen.therockparty.com/ URL which redirects to the current stream server location, however for users based in virtual worlds such as InWorldz and Second Life, not all viewers support redirected URLs.  So here is the new direct stream information for therockparty.com:

http://techno.neostreams.info:10014/

Please update all music player references, including any virtual world radios and parcel “About Land” music URL settings.

Also further complicating things, there was also a poorly-timed failure of the broadcast software used, which stopped all streaming some time Friday afternoon, even if you were using the correct new URL.  This has also been resolved.

The pop-out radio player has now also been updated with the new stream.

You may or may not have noticed that therockparty.com web site has music player in the top-right corner of the page.  This player also has a “pop-out” button for listening in a separate window, which can be really convenient.

While I’m very happy with this player in general, it doesn’t beat the features and reliability of a dedicated music player. For Windows users, I strongly recommend something like WinAMP when listening to therockparty.com for long periods of time.  With a player installed that recognizes .PLS files, you can also save a link to therockparty.com on your desktop or elsewhere by downloading the .PLS file on the right hand side here, and double-clicking that to listen.

However, the popup web player is based on Adobe Flash.  While this provides a good cross-platform experience for most users, we have experienced several repeated crashes of the Adobe Flash environment, which stops music play when it happens.  If you see such a crash, you may need to refresh that window (typically F5) or close and reopen the music player.

We’re hoping that HTML5 and other recent advances will trigger a burst of activity resulting in the offering of many other music players based on technologies more reliable than Adobe Flash.

therockparty.com website and the station music stream will both be down overnight, one more time, pending their move to the final station location.  Fear  not, the Internet connection should be live sometime tomorrow afternoon (December 19th), and both will return to full service at that time.

Downtime is expected to be about 12-14  hours.

The Rock Party is back.  Now streaming again as usual, 24 x 7.  The big move over 1100 miles is complete, but streaming from a temporary location.

The much smaller final move to the permanent new location is scheduled for some time the weekend of December 17-20th, depending on when the Internet connection is available.  At that time the server machines will be moved to that location and there will be a much shorter downtime of about an hour.

Over the next 24 hours, there may be short-term outages of therockparty.com while equipment is prepared for the final move, which should being tomorrow, December 1st.

For the next 24 hours, there may be periods as long as  an hour where the station machines are powered down.

Tomorrow, December 1st, therockparty.com will be physically moved to a new location outside Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.  During the physical move, the station will be down.  It is expected to be back on the air as early as Saturday night, December 3rd.

We apologize for any inconvenience and promise to be bringing you the Internet’s best rock music as soon as we can!

Live DJ show at 9pm Pacific/12am Eastern

Tonight we will be broadcasting a special rare live show from the InWorldz Dreamz & Visionz Art Festival!

It will be the last entertainment event of the festival, immediately following the wonderful and talented live performance by CelticMaidenWarrior starting at 9pm PST/IWT.

The lineup for the evening (all times InWorldz times, Pacific):

8:00 pm / 11:00 pm EST    CelticMaidenWarrior

9:00 pm / 12:00am EST  Live on The Rock Party

(all times InWorldz Time, same as Pacific time)

Where: at the “InWorldz Events A” region in InWorldz, somewhere near this:

http://places.inworldz.com/InWorldz%20Events%20A/123/175/23

http://slurl.com/secondlife/InWorldz%20Events%20A/123/175/23

Hope to see you there!

The home office of The Rock Party will be moving over 1100 miles (over 1600 km), and across a time zone (Eastern to Atlantic), one month from now, on November 31st, 2011.  Of all goes well, the station music stream should be restored and broadcasting again, on or about the evening of December 3rd, although it may be off the air a bit longer than that depending on how things go at the new destination.

In the meantime, The Rock Party will continue broadcasting for the month of November, and promises no special Christmas or seasonal music programming will occur during that time.

Hope to see you listening again once service is resumed in December!

Less than 3 hours until a special live show at the InWorldz Home and Residences Exhibit.  A pool party!

4pm Pacific/7pm Eastern

Lineup (all times InWorldz times, Pacific):

2:00 pm  DJTommy Seetan

3:00 pm Astoria Luminos

4:00 pm Live on The Rock Party

(all times InWorldz Time, same as Pacific time)

Where: InWorldz, at the Phlox Rox at Equinox Bash:

http://places.inworldz.com/InWorldz%20Events%20A/89/17/24

http://slurl.com/secondlife/InWorldz%20Events%20A/89/17/24

A request has already been filed to move therockparty.com website from our previous hosting provider (dreamhost) to our reseller umbrella account at hostgator.  This is expected to actually take place some time in the next 24 hours.

When this happens, there could be a temporary disruption of the website itself, and possibly the domain name redirection to the music stream (e.g. listen.therockparty.com), although it is will not affect the actual radio music stream, which continues to be broadcast from the server at http://72.233.114.175:10014/

If you encounter any trouble listening during this period, just use WinAMP, Windows Media Player, iTunes or any other internet stream player and connect to http://72.233.114.175:10014/ rather than listen.therockparty.com.

We expect to have the domain name transition complete within a few hours.

Here at The Rock Party, we’re especially fond and proud of an amazing and fabulous rock band, The Follow.  Not only is their music awesome, but they are great people too.

Please join us in voting for them as alternative/rock at the Rockstar Uproar Festival’s Battle of the Bands!