So I started with Touhou radio way back before it was out of commission and they gave you a list of all the music you starred and you could always go back and listen to your favorite tunes at your own leisure. Actually they had a general list of all the music if I’m not mistaken; is there something like that on this site? Where can I see all the music I’m listing to in an easy to digest list? I know there is a list of circles, albums, but I don’t speak/read Japanese and finding songs is extremely hard unless you already know what you are looking for. Even if I can remember the Japanese title, or the Japanese album or the Japanese circle I can’t even listen to the song to verify if it’s in fact the song I’m looking for. If there is a way I have no idea where my starred playlist is or where I can go to listen to my favorite songs, but then again I hadn’t had my account for long so many I over looked it or something. If there is no place to access the music that I starred then why have the ability to rate a song to begin with if it just gets sent to the void?
Hey there, welcome to Gensokyo Radio!
As a general overview, Gensokyo Radio is a radio station in the sense that listeners can tune in to what’s currently playing (like a terrestrial radio station, but online). For the past decade, it’s been a great way for folks who are perhaps unfamiliar with the series to discover the vast world of fan-created music, or for diehard fans to find something new. We’ve continuously grown, changed, and updated the service we provide to accommodate listeners’ interests and to help connect the dots between artists in the east and fans in the west. We want to help listeners learn more about the music, support the artists, and engage with the wider community through music.
Now, on to some of your questions…
Is there something like a general list of all the music the station plays?
All of the music our station is currently able to play is listed on our website. What’s listed is just a fraction of the fan music that’s out there, so our abbreviated list helps keep it a bit more simple; if an album is listed on our site, chances are we’ve played something from it at some point. Additionally, we don’t play every song from every album, and there are a couple practical reasons for this:
- We have a finite amount of space available on our station’s server, and
- Not all songs are appropriate to play on the station (for a wide range of reasons)
While I agree that it can be difficult to find a particular song, we break our library down by circle and list the circle name when one of their songs play on the station. Usually it’s a shorter name, and it helps narrow it down in case the album name or track are full of moonrunes.
Where can I see all the music I’m listening to in an easy to digest list?
To make keeping track of songs easier, rating or favoriting a song adds it to a listener’s rating history or list respectively, and these are currently available through our mobile app. There is also a list of song history available on both our website and mobile app.
Where can I go to listen to my favorite songs?
I hope we play some of those songs on our station. If you mean offline, we’re continuously working on adding resources and links to where to find the music our station plays. And if you’re asking about how to listen to songs on-demand through our site, remember that Gensokyo Radio is a radio station, not an on-demand service. We encourage listeners to support the artists so that they might continue to create great music!
If there is no place to access the music I’ve starred, why have the ability to rate a song to begin with if it just gets sent to the void?
I covered this a bit earlier, but ratings don’t just get sent to “the void”. Aside from listeners being able to refer back to their rating history, song ratings are an important part of determining what our listeners like, what they don’t like, and what we should consider investing in when we expand the station’s library. Plus, ratings contribute to our annual Top 100 lists which you can find on our YouTube channel.
Hopefully that sheds a bit more light on how GR currently works. Let me know if you have any other questions or suggestions.
Okay, thanks for the response,
I downloaded the app for the rankings, no problem there. I realized the history/ last 50 songs at the very bottom of the page, a bit out of the way but no problem there. It’s pretty easy to recognize what original Touhou is being remixed/covered but do you think there is a way to implement a way to search for the base song; lets I can search “Broken Moon”, and a list pops up and shows all the Broken Moon songs, covers and remixes, or something like that. But overall, thanks for the response.
I’ll admit, the history page was one of the last things added to the new theme, and I might try to find a better place for navigating to that… same with the link for the circle catalog.
What you’re describing with the base song idea is part of a larger project that has yet to be started. That type of information would be largely manually added, and it would be part of a pending tagging system which would help to catalog things such as the game source, genres, instruments, vocalists, etc. There’s the issue of cataloging that information, and then there’s accessing and displaying it in a way that makes sense.
Search (which was temporarily removed in the transition to GR8) will eventually return to help make finding that kind of information easier, but it will get more complicated as information about each song becomes more verbose. This coincides with a database-related project that is already underway, but we probably won’t see tags visible for songs for at least a few months, likely more.
Oooof, a few months. Sounds like quite a project, but I feel better knowing something is on the agenda. 