Re: streams and metadata

[Yoni Rabkin]

"Fran Burstall (Gmail)" <fran.burstall@gmail.com> writes:

> I have been playing with emms-streams and with
>
>    (setopt emms-player-mpv-update-metadata t)
>
> it is very capable.
>
> One mild pain point however is that adding a new stream with
> 'emms-add-streamlist' and friends gives a streamlist with less
> information than the built-in streamlists: it lacks the metadata field
> which is useful for getting the station name (which can then be fed to
> a track-description function to make for a more informative display in
> the playlist buffer).
>
> Of course, one can populate such a field by hand and this is what I have
> been doing but There Must Be A Better Way.  This is the sort of thing that
> the unimplemented emms-streams-info.el could be doing but I understand that
> querying the url for such information is a bit of a nightmare (does the
> stream have ICY tags etc).  There have been previous discussions on this
> list about this.

Indeed, embedded information in streams is a pain. In their defense,
they have been around since when having enough bandwidth to stream audio
was considered impressive.

> However, there seems to be an alternative: https://www.radio-browser.info
> is a free (as in freedom, as far as I can tell) repository of station
> information with an API.  Perhaps one could query this to get metadata
> about the stream?
>
> One could also imagine other uses of this data like a radio station browser
> in EMMS or being able to add streams by name rather than url...
>
> Thoughts?  Worth pursuing?

All of those sound great. I don't see a problem with pursuing it,
especially if it solves a problem you have.

While it may be convenient to query about a stream upon adding it, I
would make sure that the user gets explicit control over the process, as
in "This stream has no metadata, would you like to connect to
radio-browser.info and search for information? (y-or-n)" (or something
equivalent), so that Emms isn't going out and making a network call
behind a user's back when they are adding a track. Of course, you would
also want to avoid the system hanging on adding a track if there isn't a
network connection.

-- 
   "Cut your own wood and it will warm you twice"