It all depends on the stream  - I've taken a look at the metadata, and it turns out that only a few streams produce any useful metadata, so it's not clear how useful this would be.

You can see the metadata for the current stream by looking at /var/run/btplay.properties - it's astonishing how poor it is for streaming radio.  For instance, look at what you get with some of the podcast streams.

Having said that, however, it's something I've been looking into recently to see if there's some way to cleanly detect useful meta information and display it.

Maybe some streams have lousy metadata but others have good metadata.  For example I run my own music server at home, feeding both a (private) Shoutcast stream (with good metadata) and a low-power FM transmitter.  I use a Roku Soundbridge in my living room to listen to the Shoutcast stream (and display the metadata), and a cheap clock-radio in my bedroom to listen to the FM version. 

One of the main reasons I bought a Chumby One (OK, asked my wife for one for Christmas) was to replace the clock radio so I could listen to the Shoutcast stream upstairs, and see the "now playing" metadata (which I don't get with the FM broadcast, since my transmitter can't do RDS).  The Chumby works great for listening to the stream, but without metadata it's really no better than the FM clock radio in that respect. 

What I really want is something that looks like the Night mode clock but with metadata display.  Tspigot Radio - Night Clock does it but for the Tspigot Radio stream only (it probably pulls it from a web source rather than stream metadata though...but I could work with that approach also). 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that even though some metadata sucks, some of it is good and having the ability to display it easily would be fantastic.

For my specific application, I found the NightClock Plus widget.  It looks a lot like the Night mode clock but displays an RSS feed.  I set up my music server (which is already running a webserver allowing me to control the jukebox from a browser) to also serve up the metadata as an RSS feed.  So now I've got a clock radio that displays what's playing on my server.  But it's not general-purpose, it works only with that one specific stream. 

I'd still like to see a widget that is a usable clock-radio for an arbitrary stream.  Specifically, show the time and the metadata (obviously it depends on the stream providing usable metadata as Duane said).  This is the default behavior of every other WiFi radio on the planet...so it seems a no-brainer for the Chumby which is so much more than just a WiFi radio!

FalconFour -- just confirmed with Soma.fm's Indie Pop Rocks station -- the data in /var/run/btplay.properties does update as the stream is played.  I saw tags/title change as the new song started playing on the station.

I hear you

This would be perfect, can't wait for it ;=)

I'd love to see this as well. I listen to Shoutcast a lot and would like to see a widget that displayed the 'Now Playing' data in nice big easy-to-read-from-across-the-room format.

@anatmavada or anyone: could you please give a few examples of Internet Radio streams (.mp3 or .m3u) with non-empty id3 metadata ? I need some streams for testing something ...

RadioStadDenHaag.com and Radio538.nl   It shows me on my musicpal and Noxon90 elf Information about Title / Group.
Viel Spass beim Programmieren!  / Justtesting

for example: all data included when i listen with other soft/hardware

http://www.rockantenne.de/webradio/chan … perlen.m3u
http://www.rockantenne.de/webradio/chan … native.m3u
http://www.rockantenne.de/webradio/rockantenne.m3u
http://www.rockantenne.de/webradio/chan … -metal.m3u