Why can't I see song titles of tunes streamed to me by internet radio stations in Winamp?

March 6, 2007 5:56 PM

Why can't I get song titles to display when I listen to streams as a user in Winamp (for pc)? Googled like mad, checked Winamp forums..most of the info pertains to people who are dishing out the streams, not playing them back. Right now I'm using the brand-spankin' newest version, but I've had this problem for years, I guess, with various versions.

Even totally clean installs on other pc's get this result, with a variety of streams (different stations, countries, you name it - all I see is the ip address of the station, ever!).

Surely this is configurable by the Shoutcasters, and I figure they can't ALL be opting to turn this off (or not turn it on). Don't see any setting in Winamp that I can adjust to make this happen.

As an aside.. I have used the Streamripper plugin in the past to record streams, and it seems to be able to identify tunes with little to no problem. Hm.

Thanks!

posted by bitterkitten to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Are you strictly speaking about Shoutcast stations?

If so, you should know that when Winamp (or whatever media player) sends a request to a shoutcast server, the request header contains a piece of metadata which tells the shoutcast server whether to send metadata or not.

The header field is:

icy-metadata:1

I've noticed that if you are using Winamp through proxy servers, some of them strip all headers from the request automatically, which means that the Shoutcast server will not see the "icy-metadata" request and therefore won't send the metadata.

I've also noticed that some ISPs (particularly those in smaller countries) use proxy servers for their entire userbase, which means that if you were using one of those ISPs, you'd almost be guaranteed to run into this problem.

I have a shoutcast server which gets around this restriction by allowing you to force metadata through a variable in the GET request. If you want to test it out to see if this is your problem, let me know via e-mail and I'll send you the link.
posted by helios at 6:22 PM on March 6, 2007

Helios is probably right. If they were sending you the metadata, and your client was just not using it, you would get audible glitches every second or so when it tied to play it as music.

I wrote up the details of this from the client-side once upon a time ago, when I was adding it to SlimServer and couldn't find any published docs.
posted by smackfu at 6:44 PM on March 6, 2007

Response by poster: Cool. Helios, I'd email you, except, er, maybe I'm on crack, but I cannot seem to find any way to send you an email around here.

I guess streamripper doesn't get the song info the same way, then?
posted by bitterkitten at 8:38 AM on March 7, 2007

It's under "Email:" on my MeFi profile page.

I have never used streamripper, but it's possible that it uses HTTP instead of ICY, and sends the icy-metadata as an HTTP header.
posted by helios at 6:27 PM on March 8, 2007