While experimenting with mp3 quality levels for streaming in Tixati channels, using very small (1-10 second) mp3 files, I noticed VLC which has been my main player for years and years was skipping lots of the 'tracks' and breaking up. Clicking the streamer's nick and "Play Stream" would resync VLC but it would soon stop playback again, over and over. Sometimes it would resync by itself,other times I'd have to click "Play Stream" again to continue testing.

I never used ffplay until I noticed VLC was having issues playing the streams on Tixati. When I switched to it, the same stream played fine, with no breaking up.

I downloaded both of the VLC dev versions, vlc-2.2.2-win64-nb 20151228.exe and the nightly build for vlc-3.0.0-git-20160204-0402-win64.exe and both of them also failed to play the stream reliably.

When I added the same MP3s to the VLC playlist directly, they would playback flawlessly. It was only when the same was streamed that it failed.

Long story short, ffplay is my new audio player. For some of the clips, it does report errors, but it handles it and keeps playing them. Much more reliable for streaming playback.