Icecast - Sep 2015 - Tips for AAC streams and Windows Media Player?

We're on Icecast 2.4.2 and stream as MP3. ?We want to move to AAC. ?However,
we can't get AAC streams to reliably work in Windows Media Player 12, which
comes with Windows 7. ?Many of our listeners are on that client.

Any tips on getting this to work?

We found a stream which works. ?It's http://air.radiorecord.ru:8100/rr_aac.
?Most streams fail though, for example:
http://streaming14.tdiradio.com:8000/radiojat. ?We can't figure out the
difference between those two streams.

Also, when an AAC stream fails to play in WMP, we can sometimes get it to play
by putting WMP into "Now Playing" mode and then clicking the timeline.
?This starts playing content from the beginning of the buffer.

> From: mh747 at outlook.com
> To: icecast at xiph.org
> Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2015 15:16:01 -0700
> Subject: [Icecast] Tips for AAC streams and Windows Media Player?
> 
> We're on Icecast 2.4.2 and stream as MP3.  We want to move to AAC. 
However, we can't get AAC streams to reliably work in Windows Media Player
12, which comes with Windows 7.  Many of our listeners are on that client.

More info: our input source is Darkice.
 		 	   		  
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This is buggy Windows Media Player that we have been trying to get Microsoft
to fix for many years now.
Windows Media Player doesn't seem to have any product management these days.
The last time we submitted a detailed bug report with sample streams, they
can back and stated there was something wrong with our web server, because
it would only download at 32kbps! At that point, we gave up, since it was
pretty obvious that it was hopeless, in that they didn't understand the
difference between streaming and downloading.
This is exactly one of the many reasons why Microsoft is finishing last.
They can't even get over 10-year technology to work!

If anyone is interested in the detailed Bug Report with captures, I still
have the .pdf.
We attempted to work around this with the KH Build of Icecast2 Server, but
then it was broken again in different ways in Windows 8.0, 8.1 and now 10.