This week, we worked on fine-tuning the song selection process changes we made recently for the radio station’s rotation. This falls firmly into the realm of programming and database management, but to summarize, the station now uses a different method of determining what songs play next on a short-term basis while also considering some new factors.
The system orders music based on two primary factors: play recency and play count. The changes we made earlier used some of our scheduler’s built-in functions to accomplish this, but we found that there were some occurrences of songs being scheduled without considering queued songs, or songs which are set to play but haven’t yet. For example, a new album from Kuroneko Lounge may have many songs that haven’t played much yet, and thus has many candidates for song selection. However, when selecting songs to queue, the built-in system functions would not consider songs that had already been queued, and so listeners would experience two songs from the same album near one another (usually separated by one other song).
The update we made this week uses a custom call to include queued songs when considering what to play next. Additionally, making a custom call also allows us to look at what circles have played recently since the concept of circles (music groups, bands, etc.) doesn’t exist in the scheduler. As a result, the system will attempt to space out songs from the same circle to further increase variety. We’ll continue to fine-tune this new system throughout the next couple weeks.
Work on Gensokyo Radio’s first party Discord bot remains in an internal testing stage. Members of our Discord server are welcome to use it, but we’ve seen some intermittent issues with the audio handler and database connection. We’ll work through these in the coming days, and we look forward to inviting users to add this bot to their servers later on. The radio station remains available on our website, app, and everywhere else Gensokyo Radio is normally available.
Finally, we’ve got our 6th Stage event in our Discord server titled “The Meta Stage - Panels & Meetups” where we’ll talk about the events, conventions, panels, meetups, and other adventures the staff have been on over the past decade, as well as where you might be able to find us next. We hope you’ll tune in today, or if you aren’t able to make it, you’ll be able to listen afterwards in podcast-form (but you won’t be able to interact with us afterwards, of course). Hope to see you there!
Any feedback about system changes or anything else is welcome. As always, thanks for listening!
[Knowledge #38]