PLG Pro - Tags - Media Management

[radiodungog]

Dave,

Haha, mighty iTunes eh ?  Ah it's such a long road putting together a decent music library for broadcasting.

The simple maths suggests:

50 years of Top-40 songs is about 12,000 to 14,000 songs.  The Adult Contemporary Chart is about 8,000 songs.  There will be duplicates amongst those two charts so the total would drop down.  Assuming 20,000 songs all up:
1. From iTunes at $1.60 that is $32k
2. From somewhere at $1 that is $20k
3. From somewhere at 50c that is $10k

I wonder if such a package is available ?  It would be much easier than doing it manually.


Thanks,  Jamie C.

 

[radiodungog]

Dave,

You need to introduce your dad to Vortexbox and a decent DAC to plug into his amplifier and speakers.  He could even assemble different playlists via the web interface on the Vortexbox for his own private listening.

Jamie C.

 

[dave-t]

And despite all that collecting we can only have about 90% of charts hits post 1963 

My dad is now 82 and very poorly so I don't think he is up to any more technology 

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Can you help out with this planning problem ?

Master playlists for 8 different music eras or types:
1. 1950s and before
2. 1960s
3. 1970s
4. 1980s
5. 1990s
6. 2000s
7. Australian
8. Country

Lets assume we want to generate two 12 hour blocks per day with a sequence of the categories above - so songs from 1-8 then 1-8 and so forth until the 12 hour block is filled.

We also want to have a 7 day no repeat guarantee so that listeners will not hear any song for at least 7 days after the last time.

A 12 hour block has about 180 songs so for 7 days of 12 hour blocks we will need to regenerate 14 times.

So 180 songs x 14 = 2,520 songs

2,520 / 8 master playlist categories = 315 songs per category ... call it 400 songs, so each of the master playlist catgories will have to have 400 songs.

How can we ensure our 7 day no repeat guarantee ?

By creating sub-master playlists ?  So 400 / 14 = 30 songs roughly

So for the first category ... 1/14, 2/14, 3/14 .... 14/14

Same arrangement for the other 7 categories ....

While this method is fiddly it cn be done.

Is there any other way of doing this ?

All of this is planned because the random selection process is random but not guaranteed to rotate all the songs in the master playlist until they have all been played equally.


Any suggestions ?


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

The suggestion would be to create a single playlist for whole week at once and then break it into smaller playlists for each day. This will ensure tracks won't repeat for a week.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Yes, I was thinking that would be one solution - and instead of having 12 hour blocks break them down to 3 or 4 hour blocks ... but have lots more of them to last the week.  Then the challenge will be to have a smart rotation system so at say 8am every Tuesday you don't hear the same song.

I know one community radio station that has a static playlist that has about a week or two worth of music in it and they simply offset it by a different amount of  time when it comes up to repeat.  So a skilled listener would be able to see that the songs are in exactly the same order but time shifted.

I'll keep on thinking ...


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Jamie, I think the better solution would be to generate one large playlist for a week (168+ hours) and then split this playlist to several smaller playlists for Mon, Tue and all other days. Generate a new playlist every week - this way each time there will be different tracks, unlike the station you're referring to

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Yes but the splitting of the playlist to several smaller playlists is a very time consuming task - especially with 225 x 14 = 3,150  tracks ... 2,520 songs and 630 station IDs.  Cutting that lot up into 14 smaller playlists manually is hard going.


Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

It's not that hard. You can open this playlist in RB and start selcting several tracks - it will show you the duration of selected tracks. Once there's 12 hours or more - cut those tracks and paste into a new playlist.

I agree that's time consuming and currently think of a solution for this problem. One of possible solutions is to make PLGPro split the playlist.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Yep, that is an interesting idea - to have PLG Pro do it automatically if requested.  A PC would do that sort of thing in seconds whereas a human would take tens of minutes and risk making a mistake.

It could be a very useful feature for regular programs where you wanted to maintain a no repeat policy.  Plenty of times I have heard commercial radio stations here in Australia advertise a "no repeat weekend" or a "no repeat workday" ... and as I have mentioned before our local university community station has an internal policy of a "no repeat week" so no repeats for a whole 7 days ... but having the "no repeat playlist" cut into smaller chunks is easier to work with when scheduling programs.

And that then brings new challenges too with how to schedule these smaller chunks.  Maybe that's actually the easy part.

Assuming the program is midnight to 6am and we call it "Overnight" and we decide to have a 7 day no repeat policy.

In the scheduler we enter a set of static playlists:
1. PL_Overnight_01
2. PL_Overnight_02
3. PL_Overnight_03
4. PL_Overnight_04
5. PL_Overnight_05
6. PL_Overnight_06
7. PL_Overnight_07

... more if you need them

Then somehow PLG Pro is told to assemble a single playlist according to the mix of rules specified with music types and IDs and such, with no repeats, and for the length of time of 6 x 7 = 42 hours, and to break it down into 7 smaller playlists with the name PL_Overnight_##.

I have padded the numbers with a zero in case someone wants to do it for 7 days, or 14 days, or 21 days or 28 days or more ...

Would this sort of thing be useful ?


Jamie C.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

And following on, the master (BIG) playlist could also be saved as:

PL_Overnight_00

So you see the whole hierarchy of that playlist family saved on the HDD.


And of course this same method could be used for weekly programs like "Saturday Night Jukebox" on every Saturday night from 6pm to midnight with a no repeat policy for the calendar month.

Or "Easy Sunday Morning" from 6am to midday with a no repeat policy for the calendar month.

Or "Saturday Morning Country" from 9am to midday with a no repeat policy for the calendar month.


However, these regular weekly programs would need an extra feature added to the scheduler so the scheduler could identify the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th Saturday of each month so it knows which playlist number to run.

And yes there can be 5 Saturdays in a month - or any day for that matter - when months have more than 28 days in them.


Thanks,  Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Yes, that's how I suppose it will be done - saving playlists with _NN suffix. There's a little problem because playlists wont be exact duration (eg. 12 hour) - I think PGP should make them slightly longer, just in case.

Probably we'll start implementing this in beta 4.9.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Yes certainly, having playlists a bit longer is good.  But in our case we generate them the right length (or a bit longer sometimes) and the news and adverts and community noticeboard is added afterwards so in the overnight case the playlist grows about 3 minutes per hour anyway.


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[radiodungog]

Dave,

What naming format do you use for ripped CD storage ?

We used to use:  <Album_Artist>_-_<Album_Name>/<tracknumber:nn>_<Track_Name>

But are changing to:  <Album_Artist>/<Album_Name>/<tracknumber:nn>_<Track_Name>

By making the change we get a single folder for each artist with the albums stored under that.

Here is a post with a progress report on our Vortexbox music library box:

http://vortexbox.org/threads/4735-What-is-the-best-way-to-rip-check-amp-correct-titles-amp-tags-then-move-to-FLAC-folder/page3



Jamie C.

 

[dave-t]

Dave,

What naming format do you use for ripped CD storage ?

Hi Jamie

when you say "naming" are you talking about file naming or directory structure naming ?

My "master" library is in iTunes so the directory structure is Artist / Artist - Album

File naming in iTunes is normally Disk No-Track No Title

when I move files to RB they are stored under a directory structure that reflects the show

for example I have a directory structure of Top-40 Chats/1960s/1961/filename

Or Rock/Artist/Album/filename

All files are "named" as %Artist - %Title%

 

[radiodungog]

Dave,

For us all the music style storage will be done via playlists and NOT by folder names.  So we will use playlists to do the sorting for:

Top-40 Charts/1950s/1960s/1970s/1980s/1990s/2000s .....

Adult-Contemporary .... whatever

And initially we will create these playlists manually by hand, but as soon as possible we will start loading that source info into the meta-data Comment tags so that PG-Pro can do it for us automatically.

In the last 2 weeks we have manually assembled some of those master playlists and already we can hear a BIG improvement with how the radio station sounds.

Somehow - and I don't know how yet - I would like automate the tagging of the songs so that the Top-40 info is put into the tags automatically.


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Somehow - and I don't know how yet - I would like automate the tagging of the songs so that the Top-40 info is put into the tags automatically.

I don't think RB can do it as it doesn't know which track are hits and which are not
Probably some specialized tagging software which pulls information from the net can do it.

 

[dave-t]

Jamie

sorry for the delayed response.

Once you have created your playlist you can create a databsse in Music library from that playlist. This will also assist you with your accidental deletion of the playlist effectively giving you a back up.

Open the "music Library" application, create new database, Click Add then select From Playlist 

 

[radiodungog]

Dave,

That's a great idea with the music library database !  And so simple to do too ....


And Dmitry, I have bought Billboard books and Australian Chart books so initially we will go through the artists we have manually from A-Z and look at the books.  A big job I know but it will be a start.  It would be good if we could subscribe to a service that does it electronically like BLISS that does that to correct name sand tags and stuff.


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Thinking about the last post, flicking through the chart books in A-Z artist order and comparing that to the RB music library database might not be a very difficult thing to do.

Having to use the keyboard to type artist names into the RB music library to do this would be a bit tedious - so just looking at the whole RB music library sorted in artist + track order in A-Z format would be a good start.  Simply scrolling down the page would reveal the common tracks that are listed in the music charts AND present in our music library.

Then, assuming we have a playlist open called "chart tracks" or something similar we could right mouse click on each suitable entry and add it to the playlist for tagging later.

I'm thinking that I would also highlight the track in the chart book so it represents a tagged copy of what we have in our library and what we don't have and may need to get.

Then at a later date I can go down the "chart tracks" playlist and click on each track and use the RB tag editor to add the appropriate tags and comments to each track.

This could be done as a work in progress and could be done a little bit at a time until we got to the bottom of the playlist.

The above would be our Plan B.

Plan A would be to do it electronically - somehow.


Thanks, Jamie C.