Live365 Stations

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w3zhotline
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Location: New Orleans. La
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Live365 Stations

Post by w3zhotline »

Hi I was wondering if Radio Toolbox is able to show listener stats for Live365 stations. I read years back that it was not supported.

Has it been updated to work with Live365 stations yet? And if so how do you get the listener stats ?



Thanks

John
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Jay
Will work for food (Administrator)
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Joined: Mon Jan 14, 2002 12:48 am
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Re: Live365 Stations

Post by Jay »

TLDR: No, we do not currently support Live365. We feel Live365 should be supporting us, not us supporting them. However, it's a long story on how we got here, if you want to know more, continue reading.

Radio Toolbox has supported Live365 on and off over the years. Live365 has been around as a stream hosting provider in one form or another for over 20 years. In the beginning they used modified Iceast v1 servers and had an fairly open API that was simple to implement and their popularity at the time represented a large portion of the community as it was a free stream provider. At that time there were few legitimate stream host providers so it's market share represented a huge portion of the ICY community. We added support for them in the first few versions of Radio Toolbox v1 back in 2002 when we were in beta.

Sadly on a whim, Live365 clamped down on their stats API that used to be free for anyone to gather. They then implemented a proprietary stats solutions that locked us out and was only intended to be used within their own internal Apps, this API was subject to change on a whim so it made no sense for us to chase it.

Ten years ago we were approached by the old owners of Live365 to add support for their (at the time) current API. We did this as a courtesy to the community and Live365 provided spec sheets and API documentation to allow premium broadcasters the ability to use Radio Toolbox. This short-lived relationship left a bitter taste in our mouths as shortly after implementation, it broke and Live365 felt no responsibility to our project to inform us of these breaking changes. We also didn't agree with it being a premium only option. We are a free project and it made no sense for us to build features for a paid project/service.

Today, Live365 is owned by a new company and with that the landscape as drastically changed. Live365 has no free tiers and while they do have a sizeable share of the community. They need to be charged with supporting their community by following existing standards. We focus our efforts on specific software not stream service providers. If your provider follows the same standards as the three main servers Radio Toolbox supports then it should work. The alternative is us implementing endless proprietary stats APIs from stream providers who want to bend the world to their view. Since they get paid by you as a customer, they have the resources to build stats API end points that would work with Radio Toolbox today.

So I leave anyone who requests special exception for their favorite stream provider to go back to their stream providers and request that they support Radio Toolbox, not the other way round. I know we have zero leverage, that's been beaten into us for 20 years.
- Jay
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