This article is intended to help with the formatting of meta data in music files.

Our API reads meta data from the stream, we use Soutcast2 for our streams. The meta data consists of an artist name and a song title in the format Artist - Title. You can edit the meta data in your music files using Audacity/MP3tag or similar software.

The stream meta data is sent to the API via API calls which contain multiple segments, including the Artist and song Title.
Since Shoutcast2 sends the metadata in a Artist - Title format we must first separate the artist and title into two variables, we use a complicated PHP regular expression which pattern matches the data and separates the Artist and Title.
Once we have the Artist and Title, we look for certain things in the Artist and or Title variables for things like the word promo, or announce, (case insensitive) in the artist tag so that we can provide an image which lets listeners know that a commercial is being played.

We then attempt to find a match in our database for the Artist - Title combination, if a match is found, an image link is returned for a Track image from the library, whereas, if a match is not found, we try to match just the artist, if a match is found, an artist image is returned, or if no matches are found, a Pending image is returned so that our players display an image, but the image only shows that we haven't yet uploaded an image for the particular artists being looked up.

• Using custom built plugins, the artist name, or artist - title names are recorded in the database as missing images and the website administrators are alerted that the image is missing from the library.
• Because we look for space minus space in the artist - track combination to assign the seaparator it is important that the artist name does not contain space minus space as this will break the system and does not happen in meta tags.
• Although space minus space can appear in the Title of the song, it doesn't happen often, and because we look for the first occurance of space minus space and look no further, this should be ok especally in recent API versions.
• Wherever possible, your meta tags should contain as much information as possible including ISRC codes, but the recommended minimum tags are: Artist, Track, Album, Genre and Year of release.
• An API key is required in order to access our Music Art library. We have spent years developing the API and building the library so it is not FREE, we charge a small monthly fee to access our library and we feel that is reasonable.

You can download Audacity at: https://www.audacityteam.org/download
You can download MP3Tag at: https://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html