SHOUTCAST Metadata the easy way

Mar 15

Fernando ValenteProgramming , , , , , , , , No Comments

When I was developing FireRocker, one of my biggest challenges was to figure out an easy way to get the audio metadata. The classic way is to read the value of a HTTP header and see how many bytes I have to wait for until the metadata is sent. Seems like a bit confusing, hum? Luckily, there’s THE easy way! SHOUTcast streams have an HTML page which you can download and parse to get the audio metadata. Say I have the following URL:

http://94.186.155.82:8044

Just add a /7.html to the end of it.

http://94.186.155.82:8044/7.html

If you downloaded this HTML file and opened it with a plain text editor, you’d see something like this:

<HTML><meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
</head><body>153,1,257,1500,153,32,Adrian - Lacrimi
de iubire bY www.FmRadioManele.ro</body></html>

Cool, isn’t it? Now let’s parse it. You can do it in any language, but I will teach you how to write a nice app in Objective-C. Create a new project and name it SHOUTcast metadata(or any name you want). Open your AppDelegate.h and add the following IBOutlets:

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Audio streaming with QTKit

Mar 15

Fernando ValenteProgramming , , , , , No Comments

Audio streaming can be a painful task. Download the audio data and feed an AudioQueueBuffer may be a risky operation and may involve many lines of code. So finally, on Mac OS X 10.6 Apple has introduced QuickTime X. We must remember that QuickTime doesn’t necessarily mean QuickTime Player. In this case, I’m talking about the QTKit framework. QTKit(AKA QuickTime Kit) is a high level framework for dealing with media. The QTKit framework was also updated and now includes this and other new features.

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Radio Tool X Deluxe released!

Apr 13

Fernando ValenteChiaro, Projects, Tech , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Yesterday Apple approved my first iPad app, which I commented few days ago. Radio Tool X Deluxe plays 213 radio stations on the iPad, including CBC, CNN, ESPN, Antenna1, Virgin Radio and CBC! There are a lot of cool features.

This application costs just U$0.99. Yeah, I know it’s not too much, but I’d rather 2 people to buy it for 99 cents than 1 person buy it for U$1.99. Read more about it on this page.