Retrieve radio song titles from axWindowsMediaPlayer control

Question

I am am using the AxWindowsMediaPlayer control to build a small Windows web radio developed in C#.

This works out well. My StatusChange event handler extracts the name of the current radio station:

    private void axWindowsMediaPlayer1_StatusChange(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        IWMPMedia cm = axWindowsMediaPlayer1.currentMedia;

        if (cm != null)
        {
            title = cm.getItemInfo("Title");
        }
    }

To polish up my radio, I would like to display additional information like name and artist of the current song. Such StreamTitle meta-data is shown by audio players like mpg123.

Example:

ICY-META: StreamTitle='Der Langmut der SPD mit Sarrazin hat nicht geholfen, Jürgen Zurheide';

Provided, a radio stream actually includes meta-information (Icecast, SHOUTcast):

Is there a way to get hold of radio stream titles using AxWindowsMediaPlayer?

I would not like the idea of a second thread digesting the whole stream just to extract the meta-data.

Answer 1

There seems to be no easy way to extract SHOUTCast/Icecast meta-data from AxWindowsMediaPlayer.

My solution is to replace AxWindowsMediaPlayer by BASS.NET.

BASS is an audio library wrapped by BASS.NET for .Net usage. It provides a TAG_INFO class which covers more than enough tags.

Code snippet from a BASS C# sample NetRadio.cs

if ( BassTags.BASS_TAG_GetFromURL( _Stream, _tagInfo) )
{
    this.textBoxAlbum.Text = _tagInfo.album;
    this.textBoxArtist.Text = _tagInfo.artist;
    this.textBoxTitle.Text = _tagInfo.title;
    this.textBoxComment.Text = _tagInfo.comment;
    this.textBoxGenre.Text = _tagInfo.genre;
    this.textBoxYear.Text = _tagInfo.year;
}

 

Resulting radio:

One alternative could be to download and evaluate status-json.xsl files provided by some internet radio stream providers. But I haven't tried this path yet.