Are there any issues listening to streaming music over the internet?

I’ll put it this way:

As I write this, I’m listening to streaming music over the internet.
In fact, it’s been running continuously for days.

Let’s look at the requirements, issues and ramifications of doing
so.

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There are at least a couple of issues, and I think one you already have covered: if you can listen to streaming music at all, then your PC is likely to be quite capable of it. The fact that it’s “old” doesn’t appear to matter. The only time that might be an issue is if you were doing something else at the same time that required a lot of computation from your CPU – the music might stutter or pause or stop while that happened.

The fact is that most computers manufactured within, say, the past 10 or 15 years or so are quite capable of streaming and playing audio for extended periods of time. The only limitation is how much else you might be able to do at the same time. My newer machine has a fairly powerful processor and fast disk, so I don’t even think about it; an older machine might require a little more caution.

Or not – as I said, the only real ramification is that when over-taxed the music might stutter or stop.

You mentioned some programs taking too much memory. While that’s not strictly true in this case, there are issues related to it. Most of the popular media players like Windows Media Player, iTunes, WinAmp, VLC Media Player and others are all solid, robust programs that for the most part work well. They use memory, of course, and some use more than others but it’s usually not excessive. Once again, the greatest impact you might see is how many other things you might be able to do at the same time as playing music before your system begins to bog down due to there being insufficient memory to do them all.

Unfortunately, occasionally one or the other media player will have a bug of a type that’s referred to as a “memory leak”. A memory leak causes the program to use more and more memory the longer it runs. Playing a single song might not expose it, but leaving your streaming audio running for hours or days certainly could.

Now you and I are not the only ones running streaming audio for long periods of time, so when one of these players has a leak, it’s typically resolved fairly quickly. The take-away here is to make sure you’re running the latest version of whatever player you choose to run.

The final issue is bandwidth. You have DSL, which is good, but realize that when you’re streaming music you’re continually using some portion of that bandwidth that might be used for other things like downloading email or surfing the internet. So, either of two things *may* happen: either other things you do on the internet might get a little slower, like browsing web pages or downloading email, or your music might once again stutter, pause or stop if something else is trying to use all your internet bandwidth. The most common cause might be a lengthy download of some sort.

And to be clear, the impact of the bandwidth of your internet connection is unrelated to the power or age of your machine. The newest, fastest machine can still have issues playing streaming audio if it’s on a slow or saturated internet connection.

In fact, particularly when it comes to streaming video, it’s the internet connection bandwidth that is the most common choke point.