There are a few utilities in the Hardy release of Ubuntu, that don't play shoutcast streams correctly.

These are: vlc, gmplayer, mplayer, totem.

When a shoutcast MP3 audio stream is played you can hear chirps and other dropouts.

This is due to some data mixed in with the audio stream which is not filtered out correctly. Instead of showing the data in the player the software tries to convert the data into sound.

To fix this problem:

Execute as root:

 sed -i 's/Icy-MetaData:/Xcy-MetaData:/g' /usr/bin/gmplayer
 sed -i 's/Icy-MetaData:/Xcy-MetaData:/g' /usr/bin/mplayer
 sed -i 's/icy-metadata:/Xcy-MetaData:/g' /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstgnomevfs.so

Tested on: Ubuntu hardy (dd 25-apr-2008)