So we're making huge progress on our little app which reads a text file
and re-inserts metadata on the currently playing track into the icecast
stream. The behaviour of course that I'm trying to replicate is where
a user listening to pulverradio.com via iTunes or WinAmp gets to see
the currently playing track etc. in their player just like on radio
stations that DON'T use hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of
production and encoding gear. :)
So when I listen to other stations that stream using icecast/shoutcast
and ices/shoutcast source the player is swapping and/or scrolling
between what looks like the name of the station and the currently
playing song. This is what I want to achieve with our efforts. This
means that somehow we have to tell the player, via the relay servers,
BOTH the static station information AND the currently playing track.
The question is, how exactly do they arrive at this information?
Is the media player:
A) Swapping between some information element it receives on connect
(like a global Stream Title attribute of some sort) and the StreamTitle
attribute which is updated by ices when the song changes?
B) Simply displaying the StreamTitle attribute, which contains both
the name of the station and the currently playing song?
C) Displaying the StreamTitle attribute, which contains either the
name of the station or the currently playing song, and is updated every
few seconds?
D) Doing something else I haven't thought of?
-Ian.
