I did some more work for the radio station today. I’ve implemented what I’d like to call EPG or Electronic Program Guide in their Internet stream.
Icecast supports metadata in MP3 & AAC+ streams so this metadata can be used to represent whats being sent to air such as the name of the program or the name of the track.
I needed a databased calendar for EPG. So I turned to Google Calendar because of its easy interface to modify the calendar data. It also has an API which can be used to both perform lookups of whats presently on so we can send that to Icecast, and we can use the API to pull the whole program guide and apply our own formatting on our website.
Today I made a script to pull the current entry from Google Calendar and to publish it to Icecast over HTTP. I had always thought this would be difficult to pull off, however it ended up to be much easier than I ever imagined. I wrote this script in PHP so that its modular with the same lookup functions I’ll later use on the web based player.
Now all that remains is to convince the web developer that the program guide should use the Google Calendar data so we’re not maintaining 2 different program guides. I’m still waiting for him to implement my web based player. And its been 2 months since I first requested admin privileges to his WordPress installation. So my hopes on having anything done any time soon aren’t high.