Nectarine

Sorry VB ! lol

Guess there is a bug: cos i req a 8mn long song but after i wanna req 1mn song and it says only one long song at a time lol

Moreover, when im alone requestings for time it would be nice we can req whatever we want cos nobodys around requesting ?

Oops, should be fixed now. Thanks for reporting!

Thanks Nyu

As of today, tunes longer than about 12 minutes WHICH ARE ALSO NOT HIGHLY RATED have had their length capped. Accordingly, some of them have been reactivated, so they can be requested now.

What are the cap and the rating threshold? Can you reactivate Anarchy full menu by 4-mat (Matthew Simmonds) l now?

@nyingen That's why "Radio Edits" were invented for the mainstream radio, it's also a good idea for special interest topics like demoscene radios, at least for some songs like Parallax etc. So a Parallax (Radio Edit) which runs 3 or 5 mins max (Just fade it out after 3-5 minutes?) would be a great idea!

Don't mess with Megasongs though!

Rapture: exactly! No real radio station would EVER play a tune that was longer that about 7 minutes, and even that is verging on too long. Here, we have a lot of trance and ambient tunes, which are sort of inherently long, so our threshold for "too long" is a bit different, more like 11-12 minutes. Demos can also run for that long, and we want to play demotunes obviously. Megasongs seem to exceed the rating threshold, but even if they didn't, we would not cap them, as they have celebrity status.

Accidental: The lengths are capped to 5:00 or 40% of the original length, whichever is greater. The rating threshold is roughly 4.2.

In a future version of the site, the locking algorithm will take song length and rating into account, possibly making length caps unnecessary.

We reserve the right to deactivate or leave inactive some tunes that are "just too long" even if the rating is high enough. Firing UP is very highly rated and for now we've decided to leave it uncapped (and active). Anarchy Full Menu would be capped anyway, despite exceeding the rating threshold, just due to its extreme length. (We currently do not even have a copy of that tune, though).

At the same time, if people think a song that got capped should not be, by all means give an opinion, either here in the forum or on the song comment pages. We realise that the cap thing is somewhat arbitrary, but it's meant to pull songs like Children of the Rising Sun into some sort of radio reality (that tune is now active again, FWIW).

Summary: Very long tunes have a very high standard to meet in order to be playable as-is on the stream. Very long tunes that aren't incredibly good have their lengths capped as a compromise, the alternative being to deactivate them completely. The days of having the stream tied up with 20 minute long poorly-rated tunes are over.

Hello,

I saw a discussion from the oneliner (and in the comments for Knucklebusters). So, for once, I wanted to give my two cents on this.
For, some long tunes like Knucklebusters or even Parallax are boring (and a bit annoying) me and I will often lower the volume and cut off the stream. But, at the same time, I really like song like Firing UP or UMD 8730 - Intro. So, I don't want long song to be completely blocked.
Also, it does not look right to me to cut a music in the middle because it is too long. First, because I can be hooked up by the song, secondly, because I don't necessarily have the time to look to listen the song offline (time to find the download link, the music name and so on) and finally, because it goes against the vision of the song's author.

So, the new queuing policy looks like a perfect fit.

Finally, I regret that the FR-08 song was separated in different part. It is a bit long, but I liked it (certainly also, because it reminds me the demo).

Thanks for your comment here. What you say about "lowering the volume and cutting off the stream" when long boring tunes play, like Parallax, is important. We really don't want this to happen. If a user tunes in and hears a boring tune playing, but it's only 5 minutes long, they will probably stick around. But if it's 12 minutes long, they will probably give up, and not bother queueing anything since it will be such a long time. We want the stream to be accessible and usable.

We also believe that the people who actually want to sit and listen to all screechy 18 minutes of Knucklebusters or Parallax here are in the minority. They are C64 game tunes. Why should they be forcing that on the rest of us? It can also be argued that game tunes are not necessarily meant to be listened to in their entirety, as they usually play only as long as the player is on the game level without dying or whatever, no? I don't think we destroy an artist's vision by fading the tune out after 6-7 min. I feel like that makes it more of a "preview" of the song. If we did arbitrary splicing, or made our own radio edit out of various pieces and still put Hubbard's or Galway's name on it, I think that would be destroying. However, if Nectas feel strongly that it's better not to play the tune at all, than to fade it out after a reasonable amount of time, we're open to that.

Firing UP and UMD 8730 are also very long, but are highly rated, unlike Knucklebusters and the like. This shows us that the userbase heavily approves these tunes despite their length. The length cap does not apply to such tunes. Under the coming queueing rules, it will still have a longer lock time, but with a bonus for its high rating.

One other thing - Knucklebusters was not capped or cut by Necta staff. It was made short deliberately by Hippel, or maybe by the uploader. You can see in the comments that several people feel positive about the shortening.