I'd like to extract the info string from an internet radio streamed over HTTP. By info string I mean the short note about the currently played song, band name etc.
Preferably I'd like to do it in python. So far I've tried opening a socket but from there I got a bunch of binary data that I could not parse...
thanks for any hints
Sounds like you might need some stepping stone projects before you're ready for this.  There's no reason to use a low-level socket library for HTTP.  There are great tools both command line utilities and python standard library modules like urlopen2 that can handle the low level TCP and HTTP specifics for you.
Do you know the URL where you data resides?  Have you tried something simple on the command line like using cURL to grab the raw HTML and then some basic tools like grep to hunt down the info you need?  I assume here the metadata is actually available as HTML as opposed to being in a binary format read directly by the radio streamer (which presumably is in flash perhaps?).
Hard to give you any specifics because your question doesn't include any technical details about your data source.
Parse metadata from http live stream