Please explain Alpha Tags

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K7DDQ

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"Alpha tags available in this broadcast" shows on links to some live streams. Listening to those via web does not show any additional info. What are alpha tags, how can I see them? I am listening to Billings and Yellowstone County Public Safety in Yellowstone county Montana. I tried another stream marked as having alpha tags from a larger city in another state and did not see any tags there either but I have never seen this so don't really know what I'm looking for. Well I inderstand from programming radios and creating alpha tags on my own programmed memories but in terms of listening to a live stream, I've never seen these tags.

Any tips or explanation of how this works from a listeners point of view?
 

K7DDQ

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Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B146 Safari/8536.25)

Anyone know what an alpha tag is from the listener perspective?
 

04Z1V6

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Alpha tags are information sent by feed provider about what you are listening to IE, I send alpha tags on the right channel of my feed, when the town police are talking it will show "CRPD Ch-1" in the players window but you must use a program that has the ability to do this. One of the listening programs that does this is Winamp.
 

K7DDQ

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Ok, so not all players support this then. I've only been using the web player on PC and iPhone and S.R. Deluxe on iPhone. Neither of those show tags as far as I can tell.

So is there a list of players that support alpha tags per platform?

Thanks!
 

ProScan

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"Alpha tags available in this broadcast" shows on links to some live streams. Listening to those via web does not show any additional info. What are alpha tags, how can I see them? I am listening to Billings and Yellowstone County Public Safety in Yellowstone county Montana. I tried another stream marked as having alpha tags from a larger city in another state and did not see any tags there either but I have never seen this so don't really know what I'm looking for. Well I inderstand from programming radios and creating alpha tags on my own programmed memories but in terms of listening to a live stream, I've never seen these tags.

Any tips or explanation of how this works from a listeners point of view?

The number one tip is to use a media player that supports metadata or text tags.
I use WinAmp which supports meta data. WMP does not support metadata.
 

CMaas

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Just wanted to add that Foobar 2000 shows alpha tags for anybody that is interested. It has endless option for customization too.

I have only used this to listen to my stream directly and not from RR though.
 

KD0TAZ

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or falsely to obtain more listeners.

Oh come on. Having the alpha tags option checked doesn't make a damn bit of difference to your listener counts - whether you are actually broadcasting them or not. Feeds with tags don't get any priority over non tagged feeds, nor can someone search for only tagged feeds. They only have a benefit on multi-agency feeds anyway.
 

W8RMH

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Oh come on. Having the alpha tags option checked doesn't make a damn bit of difference to your listener counts - whether you are actually broadcasting them or not. Feeds with tags don't get any priority over non tagged feeds, nor can someone search for only tagged feeds. They only have a benefit on multi-agency feeds anyway.

That is just my opinion. I have noticed a lot of feeds with this tag that don't send alpha tags.

So what are you stalking me. Get a life.
 

KD0TAZ

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Oh yeah. Sure.. I'm stalking you by replying to the latest posts in two adjacent sections, which the latest posts happened to be from you. Might wanna empty some of the air out of your head and put some smarts in there though.
 

firerick100

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Wow,its getting hot in here,why cant we all get along-lol,i listen to quite a few feeds and some have tags and some do not,sometimes the person hosting the feed gives a detailed description of whats on the feed if they do not have tags so you know what is on it.i still listen to feeds weather there are tags or not. For instance i have 5.0 radio pro scanner app on my ipad and i phone and listen to fdny feed with Ll the boros on one feed and the tags come up to which boro is talking at the time and i dont have the special software mentioned above to get tags same with the cape cod feed i listen to
 

kibler

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Some feed providers select the "Broadcasting Alpha Tags" option even though they are not providing alpha tags, either from lack of knowledge of what it is, unaware they have checked the box, or falsely to obtain more listeners.
W8RMH....I happen to agree with you about the "alpha tag ICON" being checked and no alpha tags????...There is a feed provider close to me that has it checked, but Alpha tags I have not seen displayed?.....And yes I did not listen to this feed because it is not near as interesting if there actually was tags being displayed! Not really complaining about it, this is just my opinion! KD0TAZ you have your right to any opinion, but please don't attack anyone else for giving there 2 cents! Have a great day
 
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KD0TAZ

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W8RMH....I happen to agree with you about the "alpha tag ICON" being checked and no alpha tags????...There is a feed provider close to me that has it checked, but Alpha tags I have not seen displayed?.....And yes I did not listen to this feed because it is not near as interesting if there actually was tags being displayed! Not really complaining about it, this is just my opinion! KD0TAZ you have your right to any opinion, but please don't attack anyone else for giving there 2 cents! Have a great day

LOL I didn't "attack" anyone. I simply called his claim that providers falsely check the alpha tag option in some alleged scheme to gain listeners for the bullsh*t that it is. If a feed is showing that it has tags and they aren't really broadcasting them, it's either because of issues with the scanner connection or they didn't know what the checkbox meant when they created the feed. MAYBE a couple are stupid enough to believe that checking it even though they aren't broadcasting them will get them more listeners - but it doesn't. At all.

So this feed you know about that doesn't send tags.. Instead of whining about it here where it will do nothing, hit the 'REPORT A PROBLEM" button on the feed and let the provider know that his tags aren't working.
 
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eaf1956

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Oh come on. Having the alpha tags option checked doesn't make a damn bit of difference to your listener counts - whether you are actually broadcasting them or not. Feeds with tags don't get any priority over non tagged feeds, nor can someone search for only tagged feeds. They only have a benefit on multi-agency feeds anyway.

Ditto
 
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