Add Radio Paradise as a "music service"

davidh · January 1, 2020, 5:45pm

Right now I open Roon on my computer and then open the web page for Radio Paradise to get artist and so go info . Not ideal

DaveW42 · January 1, 2020, 6:49pm

+1 from me

Steve_Wilcox · January 2, 2020, 6:42pm

+1 to be able to see RP track info in Roon.

willemzout · January 2, 2020, 8:09pm

+1 from me! Listening to RP a lot lately.

pstrisik · January 2, 2020, 9:16pm

I use Shazam on Android. It has an overlay function so the shazam widget is at the right edge of Roon. I tap it and the song/artist displays without having to leave Roon.

My understanding is that metadata is not available on flac streams, so it may not be in Roon’s ability to provide it unless some buffering, analyzing, looking up, then playing was instituted. Doesn’t seem to be very likely to me.

garym · January 2, 2020, 10:55pm

Not sure of the technicalities of how it works, but someone was able to create a RadioParadise plugin for LMS/Squeezeboxes that both plays FLAC streams and also shows the correct album art, and artist/title information. When I play the FLAC stream via LMS, I get this information immediately, so whatever is going on in the background can’t be too time consuming.

pstrisik · January 2, 2020, 11:19pm

Well that’s hopeful! Maybe more doable than I thought.

andybob · January 2, 2020, 11:43pm

Radio Paradise originally had a FLAC stream that included metadata in a custom way. They published an API to access it. If you used the RP player app then the stream included metadata and pix. This was, however, incompatible with Roon and users petitioned both RP and Roon to become compatible. Roon was understandably reluctant to build software to accommodate a single radio station, having been led down various blind alleys (by the BBC in particular) in the past. Eventually RP changed to a conventional FLAC stream, which is why we can listen to it in Roon at all.

The FLAC format includes provision for metadata as follows:

Metadata

FLAC supports ReplayGain.
For tagging, FLAC uses the same system as Vorbis comments.[10]
The libFLAC API is organized into streams, seekable streams, and files (listed in the order of increasing abstraction from the base FLAC bitstream).
Most FLAC applications will generally restrict themselves to encoding/decoding using libFLAC at the file level interface

So as I understand it two things are required for Roon to incorporate FLAC metadata. The station must broadcast it and Roon needs to display it. I don’t know what, if any, stations are broadcasting metadata nor the extent to which Roon can currently use it. I’ll try to find out.

garym · January 3, 2020, 10:45pm

Thanks. LMS must be using that RP special AP for the metadata. On LMS I can access RP FLAC in two ways, the direct stream and an interactive stream (where I can fast forward to upcoming tracks). In both cases I get artwork and metadata.

p.s. I’m not suggesting that Roon do anything special to access RP, I’m only pointing out that the metadata and artwork is possible. But I’m sure Roon has much more high priority items to work on.

Michael_Wyden · January 4, 2020, 7:45am

Hmm, wouldn’t it be possible to play the FLAC stream, but fetch the AAC or MP3 stream metadata? That could work for all Music stations, not just RP

Jon_Mansey · January 8, 2020, 7:20pm

There is also a RP plugin for Volumio that has the metadata.

greg_easley · January 27, 2020, 12:46am

I’ve become more and more of a Radio Paradise addict each year.

PLEASE integrate metadata from RP or Roon!

Paul_Brackell · February 22, 2020, 1:56am

Hi All,

I believe we now have it in latest update. RP Main FLAC with metadata!

Paul_Brackell · February 22, 2020, 1:59am

Withdrawn. I thought I read somewhere that it would be in this update but alas no.

pstrisik · February 22, 2020, 2:01am

There is metadata for some live radio stations in this release. Alas, not RP, but still a win.

andybob · February 22, 2020, 2:48am

Roon will now link metadata on the Live Radio Now Playing screen where stations broadcast the metadata. FLAC doesn’t work, I believe because there is no defined standard for how metadata is broadcast in FLAC.

Roon should link to RP metadata if you use a non-FLAC stream.

alec_eiffel · February 22, 2020, 6:29am

As mentioned by andydbob, you can get RP metadata by selecting a non FLAC stream - just make the 320kbpbs AAC stream as default.

CrystalGipsy · February 22, 2020, 8:52am

I have been playing with simple internet streaming using Icecast and Ogg Flac of late and metadata can easily be added to the stream and Roon reads it no problem. So not sure what RP are doing that’s different and why Roon can’t read it.

BlackJack · February 22, 2020, 8:56am

AFAIK they (and any other radio station that provides FALC) send a FLAC stream not a Ogg-FLAC stream, that’s why. Support for Ogg-FLAC streams seems to be very limited on the client side while FLAC is wildly supported.

I think that this is the reason for the FLAC radio stations (without metadata) instead of Ogg-FLAC stations (with metadata). For all the Ogg-FLAC station links I was able to dig up with google they are either dead (Error 404) now or changed to a FLAC stream.

CrystalGipsy · February 22, 2020, 9:35am

Strange as all the encoding stuff seems to prefer Ogg saying its a better container for streaming. Explains it though.