Internet Radio and Live Titles

An internet radio station does not only send audio, it also announces the track it is playing right now. UMS picks that announcement up and passes it on, so your control point can show what is currently on air instead of just the station name.

This works for radio streams you have added to a playlist and for the stations of the Audio Addict Network.

How the title reaches your player

There are two ways a title can travel, and UMS uses whichever fits:

• Players that ask for in-band metadata get the title woven into the audio stream, the way internet radio has always done it.
• Players that do not ask : Because UMS reads the announcement itself and pushes it to the control point separately, the live title appears even with players that know nothing about radio metadata.

There is one case without live titles: if UMS has to transcode the stream for your player, the title cannot be woven in, because the transcoder produces the audio and knows nothing about the station's announcements. Streams that play directly — which is the normal case for MP3 and AAC stations — are unaffected.

Interpreting the announcement

Stations announce a single line of text, and there is no rule that says which part is the artist. The common convention is:

Miles Davis - So What

but some stations put the station name at the end instead:

So What - Jazz Radio on example.com

Taken as "artist first", the second line would list So What as the artist. UMS therefore looks at the part after the last dash and treats it as a station name, not an artist, when any of these applies:

• it contains something that looks like a web address, such as example.com
• it resembles the station name UMS already knows from your playlist
• it resembles the host name of the stream address, ignoring generic parts like stream, listen or radio

If none of them applies, the first part is taken as the artist, which is the usual convention.

Correcting a station by hand

The rules above get it right for most stations, but a station can always break them — a show name at the end, an unusual separator, or an artist whose name happens to contain a domain. For those, tell UMS explicitly with an #EXTICYORDER: line in the playlist, directly above the stream:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:-1,Jazz Radio
#EXTICYORDER:title-first
http://stream.example.com/jazz.mp3

Value	Meaning
auto	Decide automatically, as described above. This is the default.
artist-first	Always read the announcement as Artist - Title.
title-first	Always read it as Title - Station.

An unknown value is treated as auto. The setting applies to that one station; see Playlist directives for how such lines work in general.

If your control point offers a way to switch the order while listening, it can set the same value through UMS, and UMS writes it into the playlist file so the choice survives a restart.

Audio Addict stations

Stations of the Audio Addict Network do not announce their titles in the stream. UMS asks the service for the current track instead and delivers it the same way, so the behaviour is identical from the outside.

# Send live titles for Audio Addict stations. On by default.
audio_addict_icy_metadata = TRUE

Turn this off if a player of yours reacts badly to in-band metadata; the titles pushed to the control point are unaffected by it.