README.playlist

Ices Playlist Management
------------------------

Often the built-in playlist capabilities of ices are not enough. Luckily,
ices can also be controlled by a perl or python script. Some ideas for
scripts: to produce fancier metadata, call out to a database, insert
station IDs every half an hour...

The impatient should be able to figure out what they need to do by
reading the ices.pm.dist or ices.py.dist (for perl or python,
respectively) included in the ices distribution. Others should keep
reading.

Shell scripts are somewhat simpler: At each invocation, the shell script
must return the path to an audio file as its first line of output.
Optionally it may return the metadata on the second line.

The following methods may be defined:

ices_get_next
-------------
This method is the only required method. It is called by ices at
startup or when it has finished playing the previous file. It should
return the path to a track. Returning an empty string will signal
ices to shut down.

ices_init
---------
If this method is defined, it will be called before any other
method in your script. A return value other than 1 indicates
that your script has failed to initialize and ices should
terminate.

ices_shutdown
-------------
If this method is defined, it will be called before ices
exits.

ices_get_metadata
-----------------
If this method is defined, it will be called after ices_get_next
and the result will be used as the current track title on
the icecast server.

ices_get_lineno
---------------
If this method is defined, it will be called after ices_get_next
and the result will be used for the line number field of the cue
file. You probably won't be interested in this method.