Sunday, September 3

For Radio Geeks Only...

Image of...Or “Making iTunes create playlists that programme music like a commercial Radio Station”

This Article/Tutorial by Andrew 'Buscast' Dubber over at his blog ‘The Wireless’ is an interesting idea. It’s a way of creating smart playlists for different kinds of music (new, faves, up-and-coming, gold etc), that blend together to give a smarter and fresher way to listen to your music without annoying repeats or songs lost never to be played again.

How I’d set it up with my dearth of music might be a bit difficult—but I might have a go at ‘LittlePixel’s Downbeat Hip Hop Station FM’ and see how it pans out. I’m always saying to myself ‘I must go give X a listen...’ then never get round to it. If I can set up a smart playlist that plays stuff that hasn’t been played recently I might discover a million new songs I have ready to go but have never got round to listening to... It might even improve the track selection for Bontempi Radio Köln.

Read it here

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9/03/2006 10:02:00 PM /  

2 Comment(s):

On 05 September, 2006, jowie said...

Wow, that guy had some serious time on his hands to work that out. The funny thing is that throughout all his funky calculations and algorithms, he found himself messing about with the result manually. I'm not entirely sure how and why he ended up doing everything on a three-hour rotation? I'd like to give it a try, but I think I'd give up after a short period of time :-)

 
On 06 September, 2006, Dubber said...

You'd think I have time on my hands, but actually, I'm just a little bit obsessive.

The three hour rotation was a solution to a problem of refreshing the contents of the A-list. I had 12 tracks in there, and I wanted to make a one hour folder that contained 4 of them. Ideally, it would have dumped each one as it played, and grabbed a new one out of the 'basket', but the only way to do that was to get rid of anything that had played in the last 1 day - and that was no good at all.

The only real solution was to put all 12 of the A-rotates into the A-list and then multiply everything else by 3 as well. The b-list could still refresh on a 1-day basis, but all of the A-rotates would always need to be available to the Party Shuffle all of the time - otherwise you'd end up with 4 that always kept playing, and 8 in reserve.

It becomes apparent quite quickly when you start doing it...

Thanks for the mention!

 

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