Icecast - Sep 2019 - Best method of grabbing Now Playing metadata with PHP?

Hi,

On 9/14/19 5:56 PM, Thomas B. Rücker wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 9/12/19 9:05 PM, Richard G Elen wrote:
>> Hi...
>>
>> Can someone do me the favour of pointing us at a routine, library,
>> script or technique that will grab Now Playing metadata (Title,
>> Artist, Album) remotely (ie from another machine) from an Icecast
>> 2.4.x server reliably for logging purposes, preferably using PHP?
>>
>> Ideally we would grab the metadata when it changes - all the methods
>> we've tried so far require us to poll the server so have not been
as
>> accurate as we would like. 
>
> I'd look at the playlist.log, if you can access the logs for your
> Icecast server and configure it.
>
>
>> But there seem to be plenty of systems out there - Online Radio Box
>> for example - that manage to get the start time exactly right, so it
>> must be possible.
>
> You can just ingest the actual stream, but somehow I doubt you actually
> require *that* level of accuracy.

If for some reason you do want to explore such a path, you might want to
look at the STATS stream instead. It will give you a comprehensive flow
of data in real time and if necessary you can use it to trigger requests
for further data from e.g. the JSON endpoint.
> Polling the /status-json.xsl every few seconds and looking for changes
> should work just as well.
>
>
>> I'm not a programmer - I deal with music licensing mainly - so I
will
>> be passing details you give me on to our developer who is great on
>> databases but not so good on the ins and outs of getting data out of
>> Icecast. Needless to say, I have ploughed through the documentation
>> provided but I evidently need something a bit more basic.
>
> Maybe you should consider directing them to this mailing list. It might
> be possible to come up with a simpler solution in technical discussion.

Cheers,


TBR

Hi Thomas,

I use a program called streamgrabber which will record an mp3 stream and 
produce a .cue file which contains the data you seek.

The .cue is a basic text file. This is a sample..

TRACK 01 AUDIO
     TITLE "xxx"
     PERFORMER "xxx"
     INDEX 01 00:00:00
   TRACK 02 AUDIO
     TITLE "xxxS"
     PERFORMER "xxx"
     INDEX 01 04:15:00
   TRACK 03 AUDIO
     TITLE "xxx"
     PERFORMER "xxx"
     INDEX 01 05:56:00

Once you have the metadata you can manage it as you wish.

I run it from a shell script which is set up to record an hour at a time.

I don't use streamgrabber to get the metadata, I use it for a logger, 
the cue file is a by product.

You may need to run it on your stream to make sure it gets the data you 
seek.

I run on a Ubuntu server it also runs on Windows

https://sourceforge.net/projects/streamgrabber/


hopefully it solves your problem.

regards

Robert

Hi...

A thank-you to everyone who's provided suggestions on this topic here. 
As a result we have several approaches to build on. I'm very grateful 
for the assistance of respondents to this list.

Best,

--Richard E