Playback Pauses after some time [transcode issue?]

[xnor]

Ever since maybe 4.9 subsonic hasn't been working well at all on my system, the audio pauses and doesn't recover, sometimes within seconds, sometimes within minutes. I've tried the various transcode settings mentioned in various forum posts, I've tried reverting to the settings suggested via the link on the transcode page: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/transcoding.jsp
I keep hoping with each upgrade, betas, now 5.0 that subsonic will again work for me, but every few songs, sometimes more often than that, i have to either reload the web app or press play on another song in order to get audio out.

Any ideas what I can do? I love subsonic but its basically become unusable for listening to audio.

I'm now on the most recent release, and I run on a linux box.

[xnor]

BTW here are my transcode settings:

step 1:
ffmpeg -i %s -ab %bk -v 0 -f mp3 -

step 2 is blank

downsample:
ffmpeg -i %s -map 0:0 -b:a %bk -v 0 -f mp3 -

http live streaming:
ffmpeg -ss %o -t %d -i %s -async 1 -b:v %bk -s %wx%h -ar 44100 -ac 2 -v 0 -f mpegts -c:v libx264 -preset superfast -c:a libmp3lame -threads 0 -