Comment 17 for bug 705271

I can confirm this on Ubuntu 11.04 beta 2 in VirtualBox.

The patch above is not recommended. Because Pithos handles errors by skipping to the next song, that check is necessary to prevent a persistent gstreamer error from going out of control. Without that check, if gstreamer fails immediately when a song is started, it keeps loading playlists until Pandora bans your IP address. Instead, I'm looking for a solution to the "General stream error" issue.

If you are willing to patch Pithos, you can try enabling progressive streaming mode, by removing the first # of line 190 to uncomment it in /usr/bin/pithos (installed), or bin/pithos (from bzr or a tarball):

self.player.props.flags |= (1 << 7) # enable progressive download

This seems to work around the issue in my tests, but I'm not exactly sure why.

Post whether this (a) solves the problem, and (b) does not cause any adverse effects, such as making it slower to buffer songs.