metadata

Displaying Song Titles and Artist

Quick answer:

Find your radio at the Reciva portal in "My Radios". If the checkbox option is available, enable "Display metadata for all stations that broadcast it"

Detailed answer:

Song titles and other information sent by broadcasters can be shown on the screen of Reciva-based radios.
However, this can be confusing since it does not always appear. There are a few reasons for this ...

Clearly if the broadcaster does not put song title (from here on this is called metadata - data about data) into the stream that is received at the radio then there is nothing directly available to even consider putting on the screen. This typically rules out presenting metadata from stations using WMA.

Stations that use a SHOUTcast or compatible streaming server typically do include metadata. This can be seen by looking at the station list at http://yp.shoutcast.com (the location that many SHOUTcast server register with). There you will see song title and other information.

Next stumbling block is that not all Reciva radios are configured to present metadata. There is no clear reason for this - perhaps the "brand" thought that the screen was too small or it would be too confusing to customers to have it on some stations and not others, resulting in a lot of service calls or returns.

So - assuming that the station broadcasts data in a way that Reciva can show it and the radio is able to display it, then the next problem is that Reciva maintained a setting per station to control whether or not available information should be displayed. The reason for this has never been given but perhaps it was to allow for future expansion (for example - submitting song information to http://last.fm or buying tracks). If a station was known to put metadata in place that could be easily processed (e.g. title - artist ) without other extraneous things (e.g. Request your favourites - by SMS or Twitter) then it could be relied upon.

In the early days at Reciva this seemed to have been defaulted to "off" - and could only be changed by manual intervention by Reciva staff. This meant that they would have had to review each submitted station. While this is feasible when only a few thousand stations were in the system, it is impractical when there are over 15,000, especially as they would have to be reviewed periodically.

Over time, Reciva changed the default setting for radios - to always display metadata where they could (presumably unless the "Brand" said no) - and a new user-configurable setting was added to the "My Radios" area on the Reciva web service - "Display metadata for all stations that broadcast it" - however, this is only available for radios with firmware with a version number starting with "v257-a" or higher.
Note, however, that the "Display metadata" field did not re-appear with the Reciva re-design of the "Manage my radios" pages in 2009. So - people have been accessing it via the legacy branded sites. The legacy sites stopped presenting any data about radios during Easter 2010 - which is thought to co-incide with Reciva moving offices and servers. At the time of writing this (11-April-2010) it is not known if the field will re-appear on the legacy sites when Reciva resolves some server issues. In any case, Reciva have stated in the past that they do intend to present all of the settings on the current "Manage my radios" pages.

If you see metadata for some stations and not others - then at least it shows that your radio has the capability. Pestering the broadcaster to include it might not get you very far - especially if their answer is that it is available through their Flash player on the web. NB It is generally a legal requirement of a stations Internet broadcasting licence to include song and artist information on their webpage. There is no requirement for this information to be broadcast as metadata however. Therefore if you just have to know who sang that last song then you will almost certainly find the information on the stations webpages, especially if they are a credible broadcaster.

Including a mechanism for the radio to extract "Now Playing" information from the web site of the station is theoretically possible but would be a real challenge to maintain and is unlikely. An industry initiative called RadioDNS might be the answer - especially as it has active involvement by Reciva and some other internet radio companies plus some other interested parties (such as the original author of this page).