[VAXman(Admin)]

Originally Posted by gr8sho92

As devices like the iPhone become more ubiquitous, I'm wondering if AM will be enhanced for some trivial things. (Amazing to even ask this question since I've only been able to hold AM in my palm for a few years to begin with.)

A few apps on the iPhone that stream music deliver album art to the display. Pandora and Flycast are two that I know of. However none of the MP3 streaming apps like TIR or Fstream can do that. I'm not sure if this is a limitation of the Shoutcast streaming service or what. If someone knows the reason for this and if it will be enhanced in the future, would love to know. In other words, does the server side provide the album art in the stream itself, and if yes, is then the client must not be rendering the image.

MP3 itself is only an audio format. However, there was an addition/enhancement/augmentation of the original specs to include metadata. This is referred to as ID3v2 tag data. It's data placed at the beginning or end of the MP3 stream and it is usually data which describes other data. Therefore, it might contain a URL to a site serving the album art for the track playing. It's up to the player to handle decoding and delivering the data in the ID3 tag.