Announce - Song info plugin for FIP radio

[Paul Webster]

0.4.0 - 03-Jan-2022
- Restore programme details for Now Playing on all stations

Had to block generation of URL for cover art for some stations because it looks like RF have left in programme image info but generated link does not work.

Still some issues to handle for stations where using two different URLs to fetch Now Playing information.

Edit:
Have seen a few more occurrences of a programme image getting broken.
If you see a white square "radio france" in blue and black writing then that is the Radio France fallback error image that they provide when a URL to an image is not right.
The problem I am seeing it that their data is changing during a programme and switching between a working and a failing image.
So you will sometimes see the programme icon changing and changing back.

I hope that this is a temporary issue at their end and is related to whatever changes they were making around the end of the year.

The problem is visible right now on France Inter.

Edit2:
I noticed that the UID that they returned, when the cover art resulted in a Radio France logo, was always the same - across all stations.
So I put something in to ignore that particular UID and it seems to work.
I zapped the 0.4.0 package to include the change because the original had not yet been picked up by the lmscommunity plugin updater (should happen in about 2 hours from how)

[Paul Webster]

I can see the automated pull request in LMSCommunity github but it seems to have got stuck pending an approval for some reason.

[Paul Webster]

0.4.1 - 28-May-2022
- Replace icons for France Bleu stations

Many of the station icons for France Bleu stations were not being shown in LMS.
This is because around half of the France Bleu .png/.jpg station icons have disappeared from the FranceBleu.fr site and they have switched to using .svg instead.

LMS and many players do not like .svg images (Material skin is OK with them) so rather than link directly to the .svg images on the remote web site, I now include .svg and .png (made by exporting from the .svg) images in the plugin for these FB stations (apart from one that is not available as .svg).

[Paul Webster]

0.4.2 - 28-May-2022
- Also replace icon for France Bleu Elsass station

The svg icon for France Bleu Elsass was at a slightly different location so was missed first time around.

[Paul Webster]

Thanks to a question over in the French language plugin announcement ...
https://forums.slimdevices.com/showt...=1#post1057043

I think I might be able to restore track information for France Musique live streams.
Because, in reality the shows are often pre-recorded and are available as podcasts ... and the podcasts have tracklistings (that I have never used previously)

Experimentation in progress.

[whitman]

Paul, thanks for the redirect.

(I was the Google Translate-assisted poster over in the Francais section as I couldn't find this thread—glad to be here now.)

Thanks for starting further experimentation.

There's much to enjoy on Musique, I'm finding, and the format seems to be hour-long themed blocks, so I can well imagine how that format might work as podcasts.

Plenty of discoveries of stuff I've never heard, which is always a good sign... as an example, Henry's Franklin's 1974 album The Skipper At Home. I heard the track 'Soft Spirit' on the Banzzaï block at Musique, which hits around 6pm/7pm when I'm listening as I cook. A cool, meandering slice of 70s soul jazz.

À votre santé!

[Paul Webster]

I am listening to a programme called "Allegretto" right now. The episode is "Bach part en vacances" ... and, unfortunately, the song list is present but it looks like it is being updated in near real time ... and the currently playing song does not appear in their data until after it has finished playing.

That might mean that the programme really is live and they are feeding in the song info (from a database) as it plays ... or it could mean that they already have all of the data but are deliberately not publishing song info before it has aired. I suspect the latter.

I'll leave it playing for a while to see if it is different for other programmes but not as promising as I had hoped.

[Paul Webster]

Aha ... my new stuff does work for some programmes.
On right now is .. 'Arabesques' / 'Délicieux 5 à 7 (3/4)'
and the track just played was
Piotr Ilitch Tchaïkovski (Compositeur) - Symphonie n°6 en si min op 74 (Pathétique) : Allegro con grazia

I don't think I'll try to extra data parsing to get orchestra etc ... because even this one is inconsistent.
Sometimes there is current track info and other times there is not.

[whitman]

Sounds promising—thanks for persevering.

[Paul Webster]

I plan to make a beta tomorrow as there are a few programmes where it works quite well.
Remember, though, France Musique/Radio France do not show this information in their own app or their web player so it could easily break as they are not using it this way.