Now Playing Metadata When "Livestreaming" and Record Feature Issues

[JeffersonStarseed]

We had a big weekend utilizing Starseed Radio and Captain Kaos Radio (2 separate & independent Azuracast server deployments). First off, I just wanted to say the sound quality was a hit and very successful, and we got a lot of notice and questions from other DJ's. But two things were noticed.

The AutoDJ (uploaded music) has been displaying its metadata (song title/artist/album) on the player faithfully.

However, when Jesse and Capt connected to Azuracast do their live-streaming for their live sets (from Virtual DJ and MIXXX), there was no metadata being read, and the player said only, "Live Broadcast" for their two hour long sets. Jesse and Capt had previously streamed to Caster.fm and Zeno.fm with perfectly displayed song metadata on those platforms. I was hoping that someone could give me a clue as to why it didn't appear on their Azuracast stations. I double-checked all the settings on both Azuracast deployments, and didn't see anything wrong, mis-set, or out-of-the-ordinary. [Note: this was the result on Azuracast players embedded on our starseedentertainment.net website pages using the player and song-history embed-codes readily available on the Azuracast station's dashboard.]

I don't think these are issues of Azuracast, which is why I posted here under "Discussions". I think this is probably just myself not knowing what the hell I'm doing, or lacking knowledge on adding or adjusting a parameter-code or .json file to make things happen in Azuracast.

[JeffersonStarseed]

I meant to give this update many months ago earlier in the year. This of course was not an issue with Azuracast, but several common issues outside of it, the first being that metadata is "different" for different kinds of audio files (ex: ogg metadata formatting is not the same as MP3). Some of us assume that metadata is automatic, or automatically written or adjusted by DJ software or trancoding, but not always, depending on what you're using, ...and the other culprit is settings and "format fields" in the broadcasting software or encoder software.

For our purposes, we have found it easier for those involved to keep files streamed (from their broadcasting software to Azuracast) at "high-kbps" MP3 (such as 256 or 320), and have Azuracast set to stream-out to the listener over a better, but lower kbs format (such as AAC+ or Ogg Opus). By keeping the stream "to" Azuracast at MP3 format, the metadata and session info (in any format-fields) is received properly by Azuracast and properly displayed on the radio player "during a live broadcast".

I have not verified this yet, but it's assumed that if choosing to stream to Azuracast using an Ogg or Opus streaming format (for example), one must make sure that file metadata is changed or reformatted to an Ogg or Opus file format.

In the case of "Virtual DJ" broadcasting software, it has it's own limitations and issues, which we have found a workaround for within its core "SongInfoFormat" field under "Options".