Playlist Generation

[Chris Diack]

Reinventing the wheel for the zillionth time, but here goes... Elsewhere in this forum and in other chunks of cyberspace, the thorny issue of randomizing music in order to get a satisfactory formula for entertaining ourselves keeps on rearing it's ugly head, and I've come to the conclusion that there's little point in actually randomizing music and expecting to be satisfied with the result. Drawing on the experience of professionals much wiser than me, I offer the following thoughts. I've aranged all my music in folders according to decade initially, 1960, 1970, etc., except when it comes to current music where I have a current folder and another where currents have burned themselves out and one other folder where a few rare tracks which are evergreens are put. The current folder has a list of around 40 songs. The burned folder has around 150, then they get relegated to the appropriate decade folder or if it's particularly brilliant it becomes an evergreen. At some point all current material is moved when a new track is added so the rotation stays the same. So the point of this is to inspire some discussion regarding programming music using a formula rather than randomly. Elsewhere in this forum, I have hinted blatantly that the brilliant Dr.O might like to extend his talents towards making a rolling playlist maker(for want of a better name) using his playlist file remover as the basis. Taking other ideas from makers of music scheduling software, in this case http://www.powergold.com/ the theory of arranging music by artist, and then equi-spacing those artists equally so that in a playlist of say 100 songs, and you have 5 songs by a particular artist, they are spaced to play every 20 songs. This assumes that you don't want to hear the same artist twice in a row, or in the case of many PD's or MD's, the same artist twice in the same hour. Just what are the brains trusts' thoughts regarding music programming. Now that Jack and copycat formulas are currently the rage, maybe random is the way to go, but, even then it's not random, as someone has done the research and programmed according to some formula, no matter how abstract. As always, these thoughts are inspired by the need to program an LPFM radio station, or shoutcast stream as simply as possible, using Winamp as the engine, due to it's incredible versatility and infinite resource of lateral thinkers and programmers. Comments and criticisms welcome, and solutions are more than welcome.

Chris in New Zealand