Some streams are missing tags when playing

[voltaic]

Hello everyone,

There have been a few other inquiries into playing streams in cmus, dating
back to 2009, so I thought I would bring up the issue once more:

When playing some audio streams cmus does not display certain tags that
exist. Here's an example stream: http://152.2.63.68:8000

If I play the stream with VLC, I see that it has valid tags for title and
genre only. The rest of the fields are null. When the stream is playing
the only tag cmus can display with format_current is genre. Title is
printed as null.

Interestingly, if I stop the stream while it's playing, quit cmus, then
run cmus again, the track title is displayed correctly in the
format_current line! As soon as I start playing the stream, however, track
title disappears.

Similarly, if I add the stream (.pls file with no Title information) to a
playlist, the title field shows up! How does cmus know the tags for the
stream? Does it cache tags when the stream is played?

On a separate topic, maybe we should consider having a separate format for
streaming content: format_streaming. I find that online radio stations
often have artist and title tags and sometimes genre. They will almost
always have at least one tag present, so altformat_* is not triggered, and
I end up with meaningless status lines like " - - . (Genre)".

Regards,
voltaic

[gt]

Post by voltaic
On a separate topic, maybe we should consider having a separate format for
streaming content: format_streaming. I find that online radio stations
often have artist and title tags and sometimes genre. They will almost
always have at least one tag present, so altformat_* is not triggered, and
I end up with meaningless status lines like " - - . (Genre)".

I agree with this. I have a lot of empty fields while streaming radios,
because the source doesn't have them filled. A separate format for
streaming will be great.

[Gregory Petrosyan]

Post by voltaic
Hello everyone,

Hello!

Post by voltaic
There have been a few other inquiries into playing streams in cmus, dating
When playing some audio streams cmus does not display certain tags that
exist. Here's an example stream: http://152.2.63.68:8000
If I play the stream with VLC, I see that it has valid tags for title and
genre only. The rest of the fields are null. When the stream is playing
the only tag cmus can display with format_current is genre. Title is
printed as null.
Interestingly, if I stop the stream while it's playing, quit cmus, then
run cmus again, the track title is displayed correctly in the
format_current line! As soon as I start playing the stream, however, track
title disappears.

Thanks for the reporting, I'll try to look into this issue.

Post by voltaic
Similarly, if I add the stream (.pls file with no Title information) to a
playlist, the title field shows up! How does cmus know the tags for the
stream? Does it cache tags when the stream is played?

Yes, it tries to use some simple heuristics for this.

Post by voltaic
On a separate topic, maybe we should consider having a separate format for
streaming content: format_streaming. I find that online radio stations
often have artist and title tags and sometimes genre. They will almost
always have at least one tag present, so altformat_* is not triggered, and
I end up with meaningless status lines like " - - . (Genre)".

What format string do you propose for format_streaming?
Once again we miss formats with conditionals :-)

Gregory

[voltaic]

What format string do you propose for format_streaming? Once again we
miss formats with conditionals :-)

Since most streaming stations lack at least a couple of fields, I would be
inclined to only display filename by default:

:set format_streaming= %F

Another approach would be to read track entries from .pls files in order
to display the contents of "Title1" for streaming content.

Of course, as you said, if we had conditional formatting, we would not
need this or any of the other altformats.