Thursday 9 April 2009

Stream Tags... The Good and The Bad

Online radio streams, you can do a lot with them. As well as carrying your station's output, you can attach all sorts of metadata. Usually you stop at Artist - Title, e.g. currently playing on my internal test stream is "Bon Jovi - Always".

 

That's the basics. At STAR we used to go a bit further with "Now Is Always by Bon Jovi followed by UB40". That's now and next which is on a par with some DAB stations. However this generated complaints! This was due to people using stream rippers and getting annoyed by the tracks getting tagged with the extra information!

 

As much as we are not to really cater for steam rippers (it does boost our listener stats though), I can't help but think we maybe went a little overboard. It also forward announced the next track which most of the time on STAR doesn't happen until the track is playing. Good or bad... you decide!

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