Overlapping Songs Between Stations

[DAB]

This is interesting information and I thought this was the way it worked, but this confirms it! Did anyone think any differently? DAB


Question:

Is the firmware smart enough to "share" songs between stations, if two or more of them have the same artist explicitly listed (or are on the "related" list)?

Answer:

It may also not be obvious and I am not going to go into too much technical detail but the radio sequencing algorithms are fairly complex and in some ways operate within a station and in other ways operate across stations in order to satisfy ll sorts of 'rules' about how we want to and how we must sequence tracks.

There are rules about how frequently we can repeat (or replay) a specific track, or the same song by different artists, or two tracks from the same album, or multiple tracks from the same artists and all sorts of arcane rules that arise from different sources including the DMCA, the licenses we have with the record labels, etc.

The least of our concerns (legally) but one easily satisfied technically, is to maintain a single copy of each 'track' of music on the device while allowing that track to be a virtual part of multiple stations.

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Jim Amidei - Principal Firmware Engineer - Slacker Inc.

 

[snakester]

I had a feeling they did this. The only thing I wonder is if it affects the balance of certain artists on a channel...for example if you have one band that's played on mulitple channels on your G2 if they will be played more than other artists on those channels than the web player would play them...

 

[sphere79]

I've noticed that it sometimes seems to grab 2 or 3 tracks from the same album, so if it suddenly starts playing a song from the new Lindsay Buckingham album I'm bound to hear more from it soon. It definitely shares songs amongst appropriate stations. I usually notice because if it picks something I don't like and I ban it I may have to ban it on other stations too.

 

[Libb]

I figured this out awhile ago - back when my G1 had the issue where it would only refresh one or two stations at a time, I found that certain, unrefreshed stations that shared artists or genres with ones that had gotten refreshed would still play, because they were pulling from the pool that had been refreshed.

 

[DAB]

Seems the latest firmware tweaks this even more on custom stations!

We optimized the ability for tracks to be played on multiple custom stations better. I won't go into details here other than to say that in previous releases of firmware under some circumstances certain tracks would not play on more than one station at a time. For example if you had two similar custom stations on your device they should share many tracks and increase the variability and depth of both stations. This is now more of the case then ever before as there were some (limited) issues with this prior to a fix in this release.