Why doesn't XMMS display artists & song titles, when i'm listenig to internet radio?

Mistreated · 08-26-2004, 12:13 PM

I was listening to Internet radio SnakeNet Metal Radio, with XMMS 1.2.10 and in the play list is only displayed "SnakeNet Metal Radio -Home of the Metal Nation - Live Requests At Our Site". But in MS Windows Winamp displays also artist and song title. Is it possible to get song information with XMMS or with other player?
Currently using Red Hat Fedora1. I was also trying to connect to this radio by using Real Player's plug-in for XMMS, to play *.ram files, but couldn't download this plug-in, due to broken link on the XMMS home site.

Ulisses · 08-26-2004, 12:26 PM

When playing a local file, the information about the song being played is contained in the MP3/WMA/OGG/etc tags, which are not part of the song itself, but rather meta-information outside the music data stream boundaries (such as the ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags in MP3 files). When playing net radio, the audio you play is not a local file where you can seek to whatever offset you feel like, but rather a stream of continuous bytes representing the sound. From http://www.xmms.org/docs/readme.php:

Quote:

As streaming becomes more popular, there is rising demand for better
information about the current track being played. This 'Now Playing'
information (also known as 'Title Streaming') allows for more information to be
passed back to the listener. In the past, there was a method started by the
Shoutcast group, which embedded this information in the stream itself. The mp3
standard was never designed to allow for text information to be interleaved
with audio data, and it is this design which can cause errors in playback. The
Icecast Team has taken this data completely out of the mp3 data, and has
provided it in a side channel (via UDP).

So what this means is that the meta-information cannot be encoded in the MP3 stream data (which is probably the case in the net radio you are listening to), but must be encoded through an out-of-band UDP side-channel. If you can manage to convince the radio's administrator to switch to this model (which also works with Winamp, by the way), then your problems should be solved. This is not, however, a problem you can solve on the client side.

Mistreated · 08-27-2004, 10:02 AM

Thanks for your help, now it looks more clearer to me, but i still can't get one thing. If it's not the problem of the client, how can Winamp display song information. Maybe XMMS doesn't support this out-of-band UDP side-channel and Winamp does? If so, maybe there is any plug-in to enable this feature in XMMS. Thanks again!

subaruwrx · 08-28-2004, 12:56 AM

Curious too.

bump

jorgenjohnson · 09-10-2004, 04:56 PM

this too was bothering me, I googled it and the top result was your post. The second result was another forum with the answer. Apparently, you just need to disable it. XMMS and Winamp have support for both solutions of streaming the metadata, it's just that XMMS has it disabled by default, not sure the reasoning for that. Anyhow, it's easy to fix, in the options for XMMS, select the MPEG Layer 1/2/3 input plugin, and on the streaming tab, enable the Shoutcast style of streaming meta-data.

That should fix your problems.

Cheers!

Mistreated · 09-20-2004, 03:14 PM

Wow! It really works! Thanks a lot!

keyshawn · 07-19-2005, 07:33 PM

Jorge,

just wanted to say thanks again for posting this !

I'm really happy that I can now see the artists and song title !

Musikolo · 08-05-2005, 12:51 PM

Thanks again and again!!