  There are many users of audio streaming services because of the proliferation
of cloud-based audio streaming services for different content. The complex
networks that support these services do not always guarantee an acceptable
quality on the end-user side. In this paper, the impact of temporal
interruptions on the reproduction of audio streaming and the users preference
in relation to audio contents are studied. In order to determine the key
parameters in the audio streaming service, subjective tests were conducted, and
their results show that users Quality-of-Experience (QoE) is highly correlated
with the following application parameters, the number of temporal interruptions
or stalls, its frequency and length, and the temporal location in which they
occur. However, most important, experimental results demonstrated that users
preference for audio content plays an important role in users QoE. Thus, a
Preference Factor (PF) function is defined and considered in the formulation of
the proposed metric named Audio streaming Quality Metric (AsQM). Considering
that multimedia service providers are based on web servers, a framework to
obtain user information is proposed. Furthermore, results show that the AsQM
implemented in the audio player of an end users device presents a low impact on
energy, processing and memory consumption.
