[Icecast-dev] metadata sent from windows based system

[Geoff Shang]

Hi:

Just to explain why people are wanting this feature, some people want the 
ability to generate the stream with something other than the playout 
system.  The most common reason for this is additional processing that the 
playout system can't provide, e.g. dynaamic compression of an announcer's 
voice as well as the music they're playing.

Now, there would seem to be two ways to do this.  One would be to have the 
playout system inform the stream source client of the metadata to be sent, 
and the source client embeds that in the data stream.  The second is to 
have the playout system tell the server directly.

The drawbacks with the first method are mainly that you'd have to either 
make this functionality work with all source clients, or only have this 
ability with certain sources.  That is to say, there's several source 
clients but only one icecast, doing it on the server would only need the 
server to support it whilst sending it to the encoder would require the 
encoder to support it.  It would also require the playout system be able to 
talk to the source client, rather than the server, which could at least in 
theory, be difficult in some circumstances.  That is to say, there'd have 
to be connections available between the source and the playout system as 
well as to the server, rather than merely both being able to reach the 
server.

The drawback for method 2 is, as Mike points out, the increased chance that 
metadata will not properly sync with the audio, as the process encoding the 
audio will not be the one transmitting the metadata.

As I'm not much of a windows user, I don't have a strong view one way or 
the other, however at ACB Radio we've only recently found our way around 
this problem with MP3 and I feel that a move to Ogg Vorbis at any time 
would be made more difficult if it were not possible to do this with 
Icecast.

Geoff.