[Icecast] Best method of grabbing Now Playing metadata with PHP?

[Thomas B. Rücker]

Hi,

On 9/12/19 9:05 PM, Richard G Elen wrote:
> Hi...
>
> Can someone do me the favour of pointing us at a routine, library,
> script or technique that will grab Now Playing metadata (Title,
> Artist, Album) remotely (ie from another machine) from an Icecast
> 2.4.x server reliably for logging purposes, preferably using PHP?
>
> Ideally we would grab the metadata when it changes - all the methods
> we've tried so far require us to poll the server so have not been as
> accurate as we would like. 


I'd look at the playlist.log, if you can access the logs for your
Icecast server and configure it.


> But there seem to be plenty of systems out there - Online Radio Box
> for example - that manage to get the start time exactly right, so it
> must be possible.


You can just ingest the actual stream, but somehow I doubt you actually
require *that* level of accuracy.
Polling the /status-json.xsl every few seconds and looking for changes
should work just as well.


> I'm not a programmer - I deal with music licensing mainly - so I will
> be passing details you give me on to our developer who is great on
> databases but not so good on the ins and outs of getting data out of
> Icecast. Needless to say, I have ploughed through the documentation
> provided but I evidently need something a bit more basic.


Maybe you should consider directing them to this mailing list. It might
be possible to come up with a simpler solution in technical discussion.