yes, the info is live, real, from ethernet and mpd.
I have a slightly hacked mpd php script that returns 'simple' format instead of the verbose html that mpd/php want to normally return.
I cut the i/o down from a few hundred bytes (or more) to a line or 2 of text and no more. it makes the parsing much easier if I don't have to skip over html tags just to get the id3 song info.
you can see what I'm doing, here, more or less.