Radio station playing

[UKenGB]

I have mentioned this in the Q&A sections but perhaps it should be here.

MA is currently unable to play radio station URLs like:-

http://www.radiofeeds.net/playlists/bauerflash.pls?station=absoluteclassicrockhigh-aac

These are required to circumvent the station owners frequently obfuscating the actual URL to prevent it being used to listen to the station. Daft if you ask me, but I'd like to request that MA be updated to be able to play URLs like the above so we can use MA to play these stations.

Having said that, the stations that have this problem are all available on the Rayo app. If that could be added as a Provider, same as BBC Sounds so we can just add the stations from there, then perhaps that's something to also be considered as well, or instead.

[UKenGB]

A different request, but also regarding playing radio stations.

Currently, if 'speakers' are Grouped, a single stream is pulled from the Internet and then duplicated to be distributed locally to each 'speaker'. At least that's how I currently understand it.

I would like to suggest a more general approach to this. If a radio stream is requested, ALWAYS check if it is already being streamed in (pulled) from the Internet and if so, do the same as for grouped speakers and simply duplicate the stream locally to all speakers/clients, so that only a single stream is actually being pulled over the Internet connection. IOW, there would NEVER be multiple identical streams wasting bandwidth of the local Internet connection.

Currently I use Rocket Streaming Audio Server (like Icecast) to do this, so only ever one stream of any one station. However MA could do this (actually easier as it has full control of both ends) and that would eliminate the need for any other service to be involved to do this.

[OzGav]

Except that MA needs to buffer different amounts for different player types and you can also pause so I am not sure this is feasible and you havent explained why this is even necessary.

[UKenGB]

The necessity is very simple. With multiple users of a single station, each user will be pulling their own stream over the Internet connection and although my full fibre connection currently handles this without issue, I consider it bad practice to simply duplicate the exact same data.

The usage here is purely as radio stations which traditionally have no pause or rewind facility so definitely not needed. Maybe a simple caveat that when a source is 'unified' in this way, it cannot be paused etc. That would seem acceptable. Currently most stations are handled by Rocket Streaming Audio Server (Icecast equivalent) which pulls a single stream, no matter how many listeners and that seems to manage fine.

Just makes efficient sense to me and MA is in the position to be able to do the same (and already does for grouped speakers), which would then reduce one link in my streaming chain.

I would perform more testing to see what actual difference it makes, but I cannot edit the Radio Station data to change it's source between the local and its direct URL, so … 😉

Regarding the other matter though, were you able to check the URL I included to a station that cannot be played in MA. If I was to take RSAS out of the chain and rely on MA accessing the URLs directly, then it needs to be able to handle such URLs. The PLS simply resolves to an actual URL that MA is able to play, but that changes almost daily, so MA needs to be able to play from the PLS. Can't be that hard as VLC works perfectly with such PLS based URLs, every time.

[OzGav]

We wont be changing the ability for users to pause the radio stream.

I have a PR open to add support for PLS/M3U playlist URLs music-assistant/server#3419

[UKenGB]

I have a PR open to add support for PLS/M3U playlist URLs music-assistant/server#3419

Wonderful news. Thanks @OzGav I appreciate that, I really do.

[UKenGB]

We wont be changing the ability for users to pause the radio stream.

Understood, but makes no difference to me as anyway I hide the transport controls (apart from play and stop of course) for the radio stations. Just not needed IMO.