I have suffered a bit of a setback, due to the fact that the streams the BBC offer are not compatible with flash. I contacted James Cridland, who is the head of future media & technology at the BBC (formerly head of digital at Virgin Radio). James writes a regular blog on the radio industry which is fascinating, I urge anyone who has even a mild interest in radio to have a read. Anyway, he kindly got back to me and explained that the BBC only provide two external links to their streams, .asx to play in windows media player, [...]

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 [...]