Stats/Listener tracking from mobile/proxy connections?

[cr08]

This one has me wondering a bit and I'd like to hear from those station owners/managers who have been through this already.

 

Basically for some clients such as mobile phones it is necessary to link them to a proxy script (usually in the form of a php file hosted on your web server) which proxies the stream from shoutcast or icecast and offers something the client will accept.

 

Catch with that though is, as far as my experience goes, Icecast and Shoutcast will list all those connections as coming from the web server with all relevant stats showing as such. Which interferes with a lot of stuff such as proper listener tracking, authentication, and more.

 

Anyone got a solution to this or possibly a workaround? I'm pretty good at php to the point of customizing these proxy scripts to my needs but feeding certain data to shoutcast/icecast seems like hacking of the server code is nwecessary.

[BWorld]

What we do is pass the browser type of the player that way the client knows what device is listening. (It checks for Droid, i*series, Blackberry, etc. and passes the appropriate variable through to the server.)

[cr08]

Can you elaborate on that a bit? Is that pretty much all you track when it comes to mobile clients is the UA or do you track more than that? User Agent I can see being pretty easy. Not too difficult to have PHP forward the user agent of the real client off to icecast. But other stuff like IP address is a little more difficult. There is an 'X-Forwarded-For' HTTP header for this purpose but it looks like Icecast doesn't use it. There's a 3rd party patch out there but that's about as far as it goes.