This setting is based on the old original ICY metadata formatting from 1998. If you have another way to display the titles (Icecast, Shoutcast or others) you should use that one instead.
The ICY metadata is a portion of the audio stream containing the song titles. It's like eating a piece of cake to know the name of the cake. You can see it as the equivalent of ID3 tags for a radio stream.
It's a very old standard that is still nowadays used from many desktop clients or apps, but on a desktop client you don't have to care much about the CPU consumption because the stream is directly connected to the machine.
Compared to modern text-based formats like icecast or Shoutcast, the Metadata protocol is very slow and heavy, adds extra weight and consumes extra bandwidth on your server.
Basically, your server needs to read small pieces of the radio stream and get the titles from a chunk of the stream, passing it to the HTML to print it.
Any other method, instead, is much faster and preferable.
So, you should consider this system only for Shoutcast V1 streams and other problematic server providers.
How to use the Metadata (ICY Headers) server type to display the radio titles:
Once you have set up your audio stream URl, and made sure it can play correctly, set the Server Type to Metadata.
If your radio stream contains this information, the title and artist will instantly appear in the player.
No other setting is required.
If it doesn't work, there are 2 possible reasons:
- Your website hosting is blocking the connection to the streaming provider
- Your streaming provider is not publishing the song information using the ICY metadata
Generally speaking, this method always works, but you should avoid it if possible, to save CPU and bandwidth on your website hosting.
More info and troubleshooting
This uses a server side connection, which means that your web server requires to connect through the same port of your stream.
So, if your stream URL is for example
https://servername.com:1234/stream
Your port is “1234” and your website server has to allow connections on this port. Ony your hosting provider can verify this setting and eventually open the port for you.
If it doesn’t work (no titles appear and the port is open) probably your streaming provider is not publishing the “icy” metadata.
Side info: ICY stands for I Can Yell. ICYcast was also the name of the “beta” builds of SHOUTcast.
How to fix song titles stuck or not updating regularly
If the song titles are not updating, your server could be caching them. Via FTP or cPanel (not from WordPress!!!) add this to the "htaccess" file of your website
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^\qtproxycall\
RewriteRule .* - [E=Cache-Control:no-cache]
