Playlist Generator Pro 1.2.0.0 - Let's Generate Some Serious Music

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

We're on the home run now for some serious automatic playlist generation and scheduling - with a massive music library and a good variety of music that should allow us to schedule long periods of "no repeat rules" to keep our listeners entertained without too much repartition.

I'm playing with the Playlist Generator Pro and getting some unusual results.  Let me explain the tests that I have done.

1. To keep things simple to start with I have a playlist source of 108 songs with 12 artists:

Adam Brand x 11
Dolly Parton x 4
Graham Rodger x 7
Johnny Cash x 14
Keith Urban x 8
Lee Kernaghan x 9
Morgan Evans x 16
Norah Jones x 4
Shania Twain x 11
Taylor Swift x 7
Tim McGraw x 8
Troy Cassar-Daley x 9

2. The player indicates 108 songs and 6:25 play time

3. With Breakfast Country entered into Playlist Generator Pro I have the following settings:

Playlist length:  6 hours
Random selection
No filter or rule tick boxes selected

4. Generate playlist produces a result of 101 songs and a time of 6:00:57

5. A check for duplicates shows no duplicates - as you would expect with no rules set and a music bank of 108 songs

6. Looking down the list I can see some artists have two consecutive songs but no repeated songs

7. To prevent same artist consecutive songs I have now added a setting "Do not repeat artist for"  5 minutes.  I process that and get 101 songs with a total time of 6:02:37

No same artists with consecutive songs that I can see.

However, there are 9 duplicate songs at the end of the playlist from 8 of the 12 artists with Johnny Cash with two lots of duplicates.

8. I have now set "Do not repeat artist for" 10 minutes and I get 100 songs with a total time of 6:00:03

No same artists with consecutive songs that I can see.

There are now 13 duplicate songs at the end with 12 of the 12 artists and Johnny Cash twice.

9. I have now changed the total playlist length to 5 hours to get around the problem.

With no tickboxes selected there are no duplicates.

There are no artists with consecutive songs.

I have now set "Do not repeat artist for" 5 minutes and I get 83 songs with a total time of 5:03:05

There is one duplicate

I have now set "Do not repeat artist for" 10 minutes and I get 85 songs with a total time of 5:01:19

There are 3 duplicates

Changing "Do not repeat artist for" 15 minutes and I get 85 songs with a total time of 5:02:21

There are now 11 duplicates.

10. I have added "Do not repeat artist for: 5 minutes, and "Do not repeat track for" 300 minutes and get 83 songs for 5:03:33

I get no artist consecutive songs

I get no repeats

11. I have added "Do not repeat artist for: 10 minutes, and "Do not repeat track for" 300 minutes and get 83 songs for 5:00:57

I get no artist consecutive songs

I get no repeats

12. I have added "Do not repeat artist for: 20 minutes, and "Do not repeat track for" 300 minutes and get 83 songs for 5:02:46

I get no artist consecutive songs

I get no repeats


I can see that in item 12 the Playlist generator Pro is working really well and following the rules - but it's interesting that unless I went to all the trouble to specify all the rules then it was being a bit lazy and created some duplicates in the first few examples.

This also means I have to be very specific in how I set those filters and I have to have a lot of songs in the music bank to give the Playlist Generator Pro a good chance of succeeding.

I have just wound up the setting to "Do not repeat artist for: 30 minutes ... and of course with such a small number of songs in our music bank it is taking forever to finish and coming up with error messages - ERROR: Unable to find track that fits criteria

That is understandable.

I can see that I'll have to write up a very specific set of instructions to help us generate some serious music - but now that I understand some of the algorithms it should be easy to do.  A few more tests might be necessary.


Thanks,  Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Jamie, thanks for sharing your experience. If you don't have any of the "no-repeat" rules defined, then playlist generator won't "bother" creating a playlist with no repeats and this is how it's supposed to be.

You can define all the rules and then save it as a base template - so you can create other templates based on it (open this template and save it under a different name).

Please let me know if you have any problems or questions when using the playlist generator.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Yep good, I understand now.  Is there any chance you could create a PDF or something with a simple flow chart of how the tick box logic works ?  It would be so helpful in understanding how we are best to attack this task and what sort of music quantities we need to have to do it properly.

Or, perhaps another helpful thing might be for the ERROR messages on PLG-Pro to give a slightly better indication of what the problem is - and what tick box was responsible for the errors.

I now understand what the problem was with the examples above - but as I tick more and more boxes to make PLG-Pro do a smarter job for us it might be confusing by not knowing which box did what.


Thanks,  Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Yep good, I understand now.  Is there any chance you could create a PDF or something with a simple flow chart of how the tick box logic works ?  It would be so helpful in understanding how we are best to attack this task and what sort of music quantities we need to have to do it properly.

We've updated User Manual and it now includes more information about Playlist Generator. For the no-repeat options, I think they are self-explanatory

Or, perhaps another helpful thing might be for the ERROR messages on PLG-Pro to give a slightly better indication of what the problem is - and what tick box was responsible for the errors.

I now understand what the problem was with the examples above - but as I tick more and more boxes to make PLG-Pro do a smarter job for us it might be confusing by not knowing which box did what.

Yes that's actually a good idea. The next version (5.1.1) will provide detailed information on what's wrong instead of a generic "ERROR" message.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Just printed out the User manual pages for Playlist Generator Pro and they are very good.  They explain most things.


Thanks,  Jamie C.