Artwork Tagging Issue.

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CharmingNathan

Member
Hello Internet Radio Support Forum,

I am hoping someone can help me?

I am involved in setting up a Community Radio service and there is a Radio Player on the website. Basically, a listener clicks on "listen", and a box opens up with whatever is playing on the output.

The player normally gets its data from the iTunes database, but there is a further requirement in that the station will be playing music from newer artists and bands, probably not listed on there.

I have read the documentation with the player, and contacted the developer, and it would appear that the only method is to moreoreless manually organise the record collection.

With an album, create the appropriate number of copies of the artwork (the easier part), then re-labelling the filename of the artwork to 'ARTWORK-TITLE" format with every single track from an album, then going into the back-end of the player, and manually entering the path (via the browse button) to each artwork!

Obviously, the above is going to be a painful enough process for just one album, let alone hundreds, so has anyone got any alterative or better ideas to help improve the process?

The closest I have come to so far, is a piece of software that extracts the artwork from the .mp3 file, but the re-labelling is the real pain.

The software I use for the meta-tagging is Media Monkey, and A.I.O. Radio Player, but nothing is set in stone, and open to suggestions.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers.
 
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MedwayRadio

MedwayRadio

Member
We use MP3tag for updating metadata which does a good job most of the time. It has access to various databases including MusicBrainz. With MusicBrainz you can update it (bit of a learning curve though) when missing info if you have it. MusicBrainz has an API which with appropriate software dev you may be able to pull in required data into an application.
 
Pretmaker

Pretmaker

New Member
Honestly a little bit lost about what and how you want your album art to be shown. Reason for that is that a radio station usually has presenters. Most radio software will only send the metadata (as in artist - title) to the server. So no album-art.

Software like Centova or Azuracastmight be able to display/read the albumart from media files. But this is different from a live-show as then there is no mediafile to read the metadata.

Most popular online radio stations use public services for their albumart. This has multiple advantages over using it from the files.
1. more up to date.
2. higher quality images available.
3. standardized image sizes available.
4. can also work with live presenters.

It's all up to you where you get your album art from which service that offers it. Last.FM was always really popular, but Last.FM is community maintained, so if you're hoping that the data is accurate you might be better off not using it (even though they advertise that it's correct). I remember a time when the album art showed a 18+ image when a certain artist - song combination was played (and it wasn't the official album art even).

Then there's other services like discography (or something like that) that also has lots of older more niche album arts.

And I myself use the album art from Spotify.

The most difficult part however will be to get the song recognized correctly from Spotify, but this mainly comes down to how the presenter sends out it's metadata or how the autodj sends out it's metadata.

To hook it to your current player, it seems like you already have the info from the dev to save the album art with the same name as the metadata and then it will be able to show it. So this can be easily done via some PHP scripting. Alternatively ask the developer if it's possible to point to an universal image that is shown that you can change constantly via PHP (sort fallback image setting perhaps for no album art). Or better, ask if you can send the link to the album art to the player via JavaScript for example (amplitudejs supports this for example).
 
C

CharmingNathan

Member
Thanks Pretmaker and MedwayRadio (whereabouts in Medway?) for your replies, much appreciated.

The test stream has no presenters, just music at present, and I am aware that meta-data, unfortunately, is unable to stream artworks.

I do realise with what I am about to say, that this is turning into more of an issue that I should take up with the developer of the player, and am attempting to do so.

Thanks MedwayRadio, for your suggestion of using MP3Tag, this has come to our rescue in making an impractial job, slighly easier.

More by luck than anything else, I have found a way of extracting the artwork from each album track, with the format ARTIST-TITLE, it would be nice to be able to export these files into their own directory, but not sure you can?!

The further problem found is that with this particular player, the filename has to be separated into dots, which is fine if the name is something like moby-go, where the format becomes moby.go, but not so fine if the artist is Adam & The Ants - Stand & Deliver, where MP3Tag will only put one dot in, between the artist and title, i.e. adam&the ants.stand&deliver, where the player has to have the filename in the format of adam.and.the.ants.stand.and.deliver - that is how I understand it anyway.

That's one of the reasons I asked for suggestions of any alternative players?

Thanks for the help and advice offered so far.

Cheers.
 
MedwayRadio

MedwayRadio

Member
Just found the AIO player you mentioned, which seems fairly comprehensive of config options. We have played with Luna player among others sometime back (just noticed that Luna have updated since then, eg. not linking to iTunes now, major cosmetic changes) however I don't think it offers more in what you are after.

The players we tried didn't play ball well with the page builder we use and we are reluctant to use apps that use JQuery as it seems to be coming to End Of Life.
Also we want to route and mangle meta data in different ways. So we have decided to keep the audio player & controls and the meta data (display track etc) functionality separate.

We can use the bog standard html5 audio element so the listener can get to play the stream in a familiar manner and we are free to use, say JavaScript, to display whatever we want, (for example artist info, track info, current show/presenter, social links, small banner ads etc etc.) wherever we want.

Maidstone Radio (wearemaidstone.com/player) gives an idea of what we mean in a simple example where they have the player element and the current show info underneath which changes according their show schedule. It is styled in such a way that looks pretty good overall including on mobile
 
C

CharmingNathan

Member
Thanks MedwayRadio - whereabouts are you based?

Had a look at the We Are Maidsdtone player, and that is precisely what we don't want - it's a stylish enough design, but not only is there no artwork, but no artist or title data showing either!

Thanks for your other comments.

Cheers.
 
Pretmaker

Pretmaker

New Member
Good to see that our replies help you a bit Nathan.

You can simply style anything you want to style yourself. I rather use a very bland styling of the albumart and metdata and 2 big buttons to start listening and stop listening. Didn't have time yet to create something nice, and I am also not a person who creates nice looking things. I am more focused on creating technical things.
One downside to using the bog standard html5 audio is for example when you pause the audio after starting it. Wait a few seconds or a minute and start it again. You'll notice that your client will have buffered the output. Thus it ends up not being live enough.

Nathan, although we've advice some steps you can take, the advice is based from my point of view on what is shared here in regards to the situation. But perhaps we can give some better advice if you give us the page where you've got your media player from (including the manual), or even a website that you own where the player is active.

Also helps if you can tell us what things you've tried so far that didn't work or that you couldn't get to work. There's also not only Medway and me here on the forum, I think lots of people are on the forum here that are capable of providing assistance and sharing experience. Some people might even have brilliant idea's I've not seen yet that I might be able to derive new idea's from for my own station.

The player I shared for example has json input which supplies the artist songname and album art for example. Which is fed with only the following information:

{"presenter":"Auto Pilot","presenter_image":"https:\/\/streamingserver\/application\/files\/avatars\/1.jpg","name":"Alan Walker - On My Way (feat. Sabrina Carpenter & Farruko)","cover_art_url":"https:\/\/i.scdn.co\/image\/ab67616d00001e02d2aaf635815c265aa1ecdecc","previous_presenter":"Auto Pilot","previous_name":"Tacabro - Tacat\u00e0 (feat. Romano & Sapienza & Ruly Rodriguez)","previous_cover_art_url":"https:\/\/i.scdn.co\/image\/ab67616d00001e02603cfa27f9eb2e0851d33ee5","url":"https:\/\/streamingserver\/radio\/8000\/radio","live":true}

And yes all of our basic supplied traffic is over https and this output even is generated on request via a PHP script. (changed the URL to not advertise the url as this is not the advertising section ;) ).

But this info is read by Amplitude (which I use as the web-player) https://521dimensions.com/open-source/amplitudejs (which is read via a js timer script).


===EDIT===

I also use the same json output all accross all other stuff that I've developed. Like the Discord bot, Twitch bot, Android integration, IOS integration, game integrations that are custom for myself etc. As I said, I mostly focus on making technical things work nice and not so much focussed on making things nice looking.
 
D

DariaSweet

New Member
Pretmaker said:
Good to see that our replies help you a bit Nathan.

You can simply style anything you want to style yourself. I rather use a very bland styling of the albumart and metdata and 2 big buttons to start listening and stop listening. Didn't have time yet to create something nice, and I am also not a person who creates nice looking things. I am more focused on creating technical things.
One downside to using the bog standard html5 audio is for example when you pause the audio after starting it. Wait a few seconds or a minute and start it again. You'll notice that your client will have buffered the output. Thus it ends up not being live enough.

Nathan, although we've advice some steps you can take, the advice is based from my point of view on what is shared here in regards to the situation. But perhaps we can give some better advice if you give us the page where you've got your media player from (including the manual), or even a website that you own where the player is active.

Also helps if you can tell us what things you've tried so far that didn't work or that you couldn't get to work. There's also not only Medway and me here on the forum, I think lots of people are on the forum here that are capable of providing assistance and sharing experience. Some people might even have brilliant idea's I've not seen yet that I might be able to derive new idea's from for my own station.

The player I shared for example has json input which supplies the artist songname and album art for example. Which is fed with only the following information:

{"presenter":"Auto Pilot","presenter_image":"https:\/\/streamingserver\/application\/files\/avatars\/1.jpg","name":"Alan Walker - On My Way (feat. Sabrina Carpenter & Farruko)","cover_art_url":"https:\/\/i.scdn.co\/image\/ab67616d00001e02d2aaf635815c265aa1ecdecc","previous_presenter":"Auto Pilot","previous_name":"Tacabro - Tacat\u00e0 (feat. Romano & Sapienza & Ruly Rodriguez)","previous_cover_art_url":"https:\/\/i.scdn.co\/image\/ab67616d00001e02603cfa27f9eb2e0851d33ee5","url":"https:\/\/streamingserver\/radio\/8000\/radio","live":true}

And yes all of our basic supplied traffic is over https and this output even is generated on request via a PHP script. (changed the URL to not advertise the url as this is not the advertising section ;) ).

But this info is read by Amplitude (which I use as the web-player) https://all-ringtones.com/81948-ruth-b-dandelions.html (which is read via a js timer script).


===EDIT===

I also use the same json output all accross all other stuff that I've developed. Like the Discord bot, Twitch bot, Android integration, IOS integration, game integrations that are custom for myself etc. As I said, I mostly focus on making technical things work nice and not so much focussed on making things nice looking.
Click to expand...
can i contact you for a consultation?
 
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rontvradio

New Member
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