Quote:
Originally Posted by bonus1331
What other players besides Winamp will show tags using this software?
Currently using WMP at work to listen.
IT has downloads pretty locked down and I am unable to use Winamp.
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Unfortunately, most Icecast/SHOUTcast compatible players do NOT display tags. The players that I know of that do (or CLAIM to) are:
1) Winamp
2) iTunes
3) VLC
4) xmms (a player primarily used on Linux)
5) Real Player* (SEE BELOW)
Not all players display tag in the way that we'd like for scanners -- that's because they're mostly designed to support displaying title/artist information for the song being played, which typically changes once every few minutes -- not once every few seconds like scanner tags.
An important note regarding Real Player:
There's a bug in Real Player that causes nasty squeaks and howls during playback, and no tags to be displayed when playing back feeds originating from ScannerCast. It seems that Real Player doesn’t properly interpret the “metadata interval” (the time between sending tags), and that if tags are being sent it incorrectly ASSUMES the tags are sent every 16K bytes. This is contrary to both the SHOUTCast and Icecast specification. By default, ScanAmerica (and now RR) by default has traditionally senttags every 16K bytes (every 8 seconds)… and so it works with Real Player. The problem with doing this is that for scanner use, every 8 seconds isn't nearly frequently enough for the tags to be in good synchronization with the audio.
ScannerCast, on the other hand, sends tag data every 1.2K bytes (about every ½ second). This ensures that the tags are in sync with the audio, but has the disadvantage of uncovering that bug in Real Player.
I’ve been in touch with the Real Player people, and I’m trying to get them to fix Real Player or at least acknowledge that this is their bug. They’re not too interested, it seems… because this particular bug was reported by Icecast users more than 4 years ago (obviously far before ScannerCast was invented).
About Flash-Based (web-embedded) Players and Why They Don't Show Tags
It is currently technical impossible to get a web-embedded player (based on Flash) to display embedded tag information. I spent *a lot* of time looking into this, and -- while lots of people would like this to happen -- Flash doesn't have the capability to do it. Perhaps it'll be there in a future version of Flash.
There ARE some well-known hacks and work-arounds that let you "fake" displaying tags in a Flash player, but they're all clumsy and wouldn't result in tags that are nicely synced for scanner use.
I know... as usual that's probably more information than you wanted to know. But at least (for the archives) you have the whole story on tag playback support...
Peter
K1PGV