Sending metadata along with an audio stream

The textual information that you wish to serve up must be in a file whose location is published. Some applications automatically store data relating to clips in a file; the text must be in raw format but accents are supported (be careful with coding... unicode, ASCII, UTF-8 work).

This feature must be enabled in your configuration options (please refer to the relevant software's official documentation for more info). However, this is not necessarily the case: some software does not offer this feature.

This is how the mechanism for exporting title and artist information works:

• The radio streaming software exports (if the option is enabled) the title and artist name in a file
• The encoder retrieves the information from this file and packages it into the audio stream metadata (if the option is enabled)
• The encoder then sends the stream to our servers
• The stream is then served to web users via the player
• The player then interprets the metadata and displays it to users

Steps to be taken

Using Edcast
Go the Metadata settings (Fig. 1) and specify a URL (Fig. 2) pointing to the file or a location on the hard disk. You may specify how often the file will be reloaded. If this works, you will see the information displayed (Fig. 1).

Using the Flash player provided by us
In this case, go to the admin console for your stream, then go to Flash Player -> Advanced Settings -> External Metadata and you will be able to specify the URL where the file may be retrieved.
The principle is the same as detailed above, except that the encoder does not retrieve the file containing the title and artist name. Instead, the Flash player periodically downloads the file directly in order to display its content.
Note that the disadvantage of this method is that only the Flash player will be able to retrieve this information; if the stream is downloaded via an application such as Winamp or VLC, the title and artist will not be displayed.

Illustrated steps

fig.1

fig.2

To find out more

For various reasons, Flash does not allow certain files to be executed or downloaded from a domain other than the domain from which they are requested. Therefore, you must place a cross domain policy file in order to grant access to domains outside the domain in question. Create a crossdomain.xml file containing the following code and place it in the root of the site hosting the metadata file.

<code><?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy><cross-domain-policy> <allow-access-from domain="*.infomaniak.ch" secure="true" /></cross-domain-policy></code>