In general, if you're looking for alarm reliability, using a network music stream isn't the best choice.  There's no guarantee that any given stream is available or be functional.  SHOUTcast stations also tend to come and go, and they will even renumber them occasionally such that the ID you've set for the alarm may not correspond to any station when the alarm fires.

We're trying to make the system fall back to the built in "Beep" sound if a station isn't available, but that turns out to be a fiendishly difficult thing to detect in advance, or even after the fact.  We've seen cases where the station is simply streaming silence, which isn't very useful as an alarm, and that's pretty much the hardest for us to detect.

Each SHOUTcast station has a uniques station number, which is what is stored with the alarm when you select it - this is pretty much the only way to specify a station in order to play it.

However, SHOUTcast will occasionally shuffle those numbers, so that a station number from last week may not work this week - they do this so that people won't build a directory of SHOUTcast stations and compete with them.  Unfortunately, this also means that a station you set as an alarm may not work, or be an entirely different station.

I don't know if that's what happened in your case, but it's possible.

Another thing that occasionally happens with SHOUTcast stations is that they'll simply reject a connection if they're too busy, and *some* of the stream links they provide in the PLS work, and others don't.  Some stations may reject repeated connections from the same IP, some stations will kick off the oldest users when they reach some load limit.

All in all, streaming music on the Internet is an inherently flaky thing.

Here's something to try - set both of these alarms to the built-in alarm tones (Beep, Klaxon, Bugle), and see if they go off properly next time.

That would eliminate an inherent issue with the alarm subsystem in general, and point to the streaming subsystem.

I sympathize with your frustrations, since we're fighting this battle internally as well.  A large fraction of the core software engineering team is completely dedicated to alarm reliability at the moment, and the solution is not something that can be done entirely from the Control Panel, so it's going to take a firmware update to completely address.

The Control Panel 2.6.75 takes it about as far as it can go with just changes at that level - it handles many of the possible failure modes, but can't handle the case where a stream fails to connect or low-level issues with the sound subsystem, since none of that is visible to Flash.

I haven't played with the custom alarms yet.  But seeing the problems people may have with the internet feeds, I am wondering if I can set up an alarm (or set of alarms) to play a default sound for a very brief time, and then bring up a shoutcast feed. 

I don't have my Chumby with right now, so I can't check it out.  I have to guess that the alarm can't be set to the second.  However, I would be happy if I'm wrong (and thankful for foresight!)

For people who would want volume to increase, are you looking for a default sound or a feed?  I would think of making a sound file on my computer that slowly ramps up in volume.  Pop that on a stick and name it alarm1.  (Or whatever the file name is supposed to be).  Of course, I too don't want a stick out of the back of my Chumby.  Does anyone make "L" adapters so I can have the stick along the back side of the chumby?