Handle ICY meta data in python with streamscrobbler

[jovanbulck]

You might want to consider handling ICY meta data yourself, instead of getting them from the stdout of mplayer. Advantages include:

• more control over the finer grained ICY meta data: as far as I can tell, the data is now matched with a regex on the output of mplayer, whereas the raw ICY data seems to be broad casted with some kind of predefined structure.
• more meta data: mplayer only displays the stream title. There seems to be other interesting meta data (e.g. icy-name, icy-genre, icy-description, ...)
• independence from mplayer: imagine you want to plug in another media player back-end some day...

This link explains how the SHOUTcast protocol broadcasts the ICY messages and this link provides a rather low-level proof-of-concept python program.

Interestingly, this project provides a python library that does the job. I modified the example program of their README a bit:

from streamscrobbler import streamscrobbler
streamscrobbler = streamscrobbler()

streamurl = "http://mp3.streampower.be/radio1-high"
stationinfo = streamscrobbler.getServerInfo(streamurl)

print "the stationinfo is: ", stationinfo

##metadata is the bitrate and current song
metadata = stationinfo.get("metadata")

print "the metadata is: ", metadata

## status is the integer to tell if the server is up or down, 0 means down, 1 up, 2 means up but also got metadata.
status = stationinfo.get("status")

print "the status is:", status

[GijsTimmers]

Done. 337a9da