[icecast] a new directory service

[Jack Moffitt]

> >First off, I think getting rid of # of listeners is a must.
> while it seems to be a very popular desire to get rid of this metric all 
> together, it is my opinion, that you cannot get rid of this metric 
> entirely.  The reason why it is so hotly debated, is because it is 
> important.  what is needed is a way to measure the popularity of a 
> station.  What I want as a listener is the ability to find out which 
> stations are professionally done and which are simply playlists of mp3s on 
> shuffle play.  For mp3 streams, for me this was done through the listener 
> counts.  Taking away this metric (or effectively eliminating it) is, in my 
> opinion, not a good thing.

Listener count is not a good indication I don't think.  I think that
it's possible to figure out this information from the other information
provided.  Ie, what's in the description tag?  Also, this is
time-dependent data.

> how about instead of bitrate, something more generic like "Quality".  This 
> should be a number, which (in the case of application/ogg) might be 64 (as 
> in kbps) or (in the case of audio/mpeg) might be 30 (as in FPS).  I would 
> say, for most media types, it would be a bitrate, but not all.

Video still has a bitrate, and that is a better judge of quality.
Certainly with current technology, I'd rather eat the framerate at lower
bitrates, than watch a bunch of blurs.

We could add a second tag 'rate', which could be in kHz for audio, and
in fps for video based streams.  We could also add a 'channels' to
describe the number of audio channels (it's not unlikely we will see
surround sound Ogg streams) and maybe a 'size' for picture size (ex.:
160x120).

> >email
> >         email address of the streams maintainer
> >         ex.: jack at xiph.org
> 
> is this necessary ? you don't want people scraping the directory for email 
> addresses (this was done in the past with the SC list)

I think so.  I want people who like my station to be able to contact me.
Certainly some fields are mandatory, but I think people who listed their
email (or a contact email in general, even if it's
stationmaster at mystream.com) probably care more about their station.  I
have emailed plenty of broadcasters in the past who were doing
interesting things.  And it was always a pain in the ass to fidn their
address, especially if they didn't list it on their homepages.

> what happened to "Currently playing" ?  In addition to this, "last 3 songs" 
> would also be very good.  would require a bit more storage on the server 
> side, but not that much.

It's time-dependent data.  If a client wants that, it shoudl request it
from the server to make sure it gets a valid answer.  It does us little
good to display what people played 10 minutes ago and say that's what
they are playing now.

jack.

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