I have been fiddling around with uk radio station metadata. I started my efforts with the radio station i spent my year on placement, Absolute Radio (formerly Virgin Radio). I have to hand it to Absolute Radio, they are deffinitely the frontrunners in terms of online radio streaming. They use icecast audio streaming, and provide on-demand metadata for their three stations. For example, they typically send the station name, station genre, a url and more importantly the currently playing track. This makes building an app for their station a joy, as you can connect to the server over a socket connection and process the metadata.
After spending a good chunk of time attempting to connect over a socket connection in actionscript, i eventually ditched that for an open source shoutcast php script on excudo.net which simplified things a bit. I can then call this php script from flash, and retrieve the metadata that way. You can see an example of this running here.
Unfortunately other radio stations in the UK are not so good with their station data. For example Heart, Kiss and others do not provide the same data. At best all they provide from their streaming servers are the title of the station, which is useless for my application as i need to know when a song is playing. I have yet to find out if the BBC offers streams that i can use.
Tags: as3, icecast, metadata, prid303, radio, shoutcast, streaming
January 25th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Absolute Radio is actually using a Shoutcast Server as far as i can see (not an icecast server), which is why you are able to get a song-history.
Kiss (if we’re talking about the same Kiss station) is the one that is using an Icecast Server which at the moment is still a bit limited in its information.
It just so happened that i looked into the problem of the ‘current song’ a few weeks ago and after asking around on the icecast forums a developer pointed me to a web-accessible file (on the icecast server) which does provide the current song.
I’ve updated my class (thanks for the link, btw) so it will look for this file and include the current song and I will hopefully post the updated version on my website later this week
April 2nd, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Great post. If you wish to listen to BBC Radio on the iPhone - I strongly recommend BBC Radio iPhone Streams - it is easily the quickest and most reliable way to listen to BBC Radio on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and it’s free at BBCStreams.com.