How to Capture Metadata from SAM Broadcaster into Rocket Broadcaster

Introduction

SAM Broadcaster is an older radio automation package that was popular in the early 2000s and is still used by some webcasters today. Rocket Broadcaster can be run alongside SAM Broadcaster, or on another PC, as a flexible, modern streaming audio encoder.

In this guide, you'll learn how to configure SAM Broadcaster to write track metadata to a text file and configure Rocket Broadcaster to read that text file, so your streams can have accurate "Now Playing" metadata for your listeners.

Prerequisites

Step 1 - Configure SAM Broadcaster

To configure SAM Broadcaster to write metadata to a text file, we're going to use it's "HTML Output" feature with a special template that tricks it into just writing a plain text file. Before getting started, download the sam_rocket_template.txt file, which you will need soon.

Inside SAM Broadcaster:

  1. Go into the configuration / settings screen.
  2. Click HTML Output
  3. Beside General HTML Output, click the plus button
  4. As Input File, select the sam_rocket_template.txt file. The file extension might need to be changed to .html to be able to select it in SAM.
  5. As Output File, choose something easy to find, like nowplaying.txt in your Documents folder. This is the file that will contain the Now Playing metadata that Rocket Broadcaster will read.

Step 2 - Configure Rocket Broadcaster Pro

To configure Rocket Broadcaster Pro to read the nowplaying.txt file that SAM Broadcaster is now creating:

  1. In Rocket Broadcaster, click Broadcast->Metadata Capture at the menu at the top.
  2. Click the Text File tab.
  3. Check "Capture metadata from a text file".
  4. Click the "Browse" button and select the nowplaying.txt file that SAM Broadcaster is creating.
  5. Change the Text File Format to "Simple Text (Artist - Title)"
  6. Click OK to apply those changes.

The metadata from SAM will start showing up in the main Rocket Broadcaster window. If it doesn't show up, open up the nowplaying.txt file in Notepad and look for metadata. If there is no metadata, then something is configured incorrectly in SAM Broadcaster and the settings there will need to be double checked.

Step 3 - Test it

As soon as you complete the Rocket Broadcaster Pro configuration above, you should immediately see metadata from SAM Broadcaster appear in Rocket Broadcaster under "Now Playing". When SAM Broadcaster starts playing the next track, you should see this metadata change. The metadata will be automatically sent to your stream(s) as soon as it appears in Rocket Broadcaster.

Troubleshooting

  • If you don't see the metadata update in Rocket Broadcaster, double check that all your settings match this guide.
  • Check the Rocket Broadcaster log file for clues. (Help->View Log...)
  • Manually check the nowplaying.txt and make sure it contains valid metadata and looks like artist - title. If it's blank or the formatting is incorrect, try checking the SAM Broadcaster configuration.

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