Reading SHOUTcast/Icecast metadata from a radio stream with Python

Question

Has anyone had success with reading SHOUTcast/Icecast metadata from a remote radio stream?

There are several libraries that can read metadata from a local MP3 file, but none seem designed to work with a radio stream (which is essentially a never-ending MP3 file on a remote server).

Other recommendations suggest to download a finite number of bits from the beginning of the mp3 stream, but this often leads to a bunch of hex output with nothing resembling text metadata.

Anyone know of a more successful solution? Thanks.

Intermixture

Answer 1

#!/usr/bin/env python
import urllib2
stream_url = 'http://pub1.di.fm/di_classictrance'
request = urllib2.Request(stream_url)
try:
    request.add_header('Icy-MetaData', 1)
    response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
    icy_metaint_header = response.headers.get('icy-metaint')
    if icy_metaint_header is not None:
        metaint = int(icy_metaint_header)
        read_buffer = metaint+255
        content = response.read(read_buffer)
        title = content[metaint:].split("'")[1]
        print title
except:
    print 'Error'

For more details check this link

Littleton

Answer 2

I used a bit of @dbogdan's code and created a library I use for over 4 thousands streams daily. It works good and is stable and support metadata such as song title, artist name, bitrate and content-type.

you can find it at https://github.com/Dirble/streamscrobbler-python

Earthly

Answer 3

For anyone else finding themselves here, 10 years later, here is the python3 version of @dbogdan's code. It may be notable that content[metaint:].split("'")[1] is extremely unreliable. Also, as soon as you come across "Queensrÿche", a non-english title, etc... the title is going to be full of bytes where the special characters are. You can't decode the entire tag, so there is a little bit of "jumping through hoops" to whittle the tag down to only a title. I did not grab sample rate and bitrate from the response headers because, they are constantly wrong. Get that data from the MP3 head. To be fair, the tag Shoutcast/Icecast gives you can be wrong in every way! It only takes one time of coming across "C C Revival - I hearded through the grapevine" (which really happened) to realize there is nothing official or reliable about these tags. This can create huge problems if, for instance: you use Shout/Ice cast tags as search parameters for MusicBrainz searches.

from urllib import request as urequest
import re


SRCHTITLE = re.compile(br'StreamTitle=\\*(?P<title>[^;]*);').search

def get_stream_title(tag:bytes) -> str:
    title = ''
    if m := SRCHTITLE(tag):
        #decode, strip, unescape and remove surrounding quotes (may not even be the same type of quote)
        title = m.group('title').decode('utf-8').strip().replace('\\', '')[1:-1]
    return title

def id3(url:str) -> dict:
    request = urequest.Request(url, headers={'Icy-MetaData': 1})
    
    with urequest.urlopen(request) as resp:
        metaint = int(resp.headers.get('icy-metaint', '-1'))
        
        if metaint<0: return False
        
        resp.read(metaint) #this isn't seekable so, arbitrarily read to the point we want
        
        tagdata = dict( 
            site_url = resp.headers.get('icy-url'  )        ,
            name     = resp.headers.get('icy-name' ).title(),
            genre    = resp.headers.get('icy-genre').title(),
            title    = get_stream_title(resp.read(255))     )

        return tagdata

Lindane

Answer 4

Since mp3 is a proprietary format, the specification is not so easy to come by. This website gives a good overview, I think.

In normal mp3 files, the ID3v1 metadata tag goes at the very end of the file, it makes up the last 128 bytes. This is actually a bad design. The ID3 system was added as an afterthought to mp3, so I guess there was no other way to do it without breaking backward-compatibility. This means that if the radio stream is provided like a never-ending mp3 file, there can be no ID3 tag in the normal sense.

I would check with the people who run the radio station; perhaps they put the ID3 tag in a non-standard place?

Ayeshaayin

Thanks for the info. I should have mentioned that I am trying to do this with Shoutcast/Icecast and Live365 streams, which most likely have standardized their metadata format in some way, I just haven't been able to find it yet. – Intermixture

@Ayeshaayin Internet radio streams do not use ID3 tags. SHOUTcast/Icecast-style streams use metadata interleaved into the audio data. On the receiving end, this is split out. – Ruffi