Nectarine

Just a thought I had while listening the night show of djrandom: What if instead of being totally djrandom, the algorithm behind choosing songs would favor songs with higher rating? Then again, would djrandom then just consume all the good songs and lock them while nobody is really listening the radio?

To solve this problem, there could be a way to "queue" another version of djrandom, let's name him djAce for the sake of this example. Queuing djAce would play good amount of random songs (maybe 10 or 20) while favoring the mid to highly rated songs. While djAce is playing songs, it could be stopped by a user by normally queuing some song. Once the users would stop queuing songs, the original djrandom would start playing random songs again, and the option of queuing djAce would open again.

The reason djAce would play good amount of songs in row (if not interrupted) is that it would prevent him to lock all the good songs while nobody is listening, while still offering an easy way for a single user listener to enjoy "better" songs without queuing them manually every 10 minutes.

I am sure the development resources for this site are very scarce and this is not an important issue, but I decided to share the idea anyway. What do you think?

I think that "queueing an algorithm" instead of queueing songs is just making things a bit too complicated...

If there is a problem with bad songs being played randomly then we should probably address it directly rather than indirectly. But I don't see where that could really lead, except "never play anything under 3*", which does not seem like the best route. IMO troll-requesting of bad stuff *may* be a problem (when there are long strings of it) but random requesting not so much.

BTW that wabe Christmas card (someone posted a pic in the other forum) looks very cool.

Having said that: I wouldn't personally object to a rule that stops djrandom queueing real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, like (length in minutes divided by stars) is less than... such-and-such minimum value

But djrandom unearths some real one-star gems on occasion. It's the 2.0-2.5 range that's the bad one, IMO. That's where the intense when-is-this-track-gonna-end mediocrity lives. Extremely long boring minimalist techno tunes, shitty gametune remixes, misguided experiments, crummy "metal" mods, etc.

I do like the idea of a heuristic based on length inversely proportional to rating though. Hmm.

If you were talking about complexity from usability perspective, queuing different "algorithm" would not have to be complicated if there were just one button on the webpage that would be available for every registered user to use. You'd just click it to turn it on and it would work situationally as I described above. Coming up with good and balanced algorithm is important, and the one you suggested sounds like a good start to me.

It's just a shame that when I am working on something that requires full focus and no interruptions, I find myself turning nectarine off after a streak of long and loud songs that are made of very primitive and repetitive sounds. This is only happens when djrandom has the floor for long periods of time.

mirrorbird: Glad you liked the card! I painted the picture with watercolors originally and I my intention was to send the whole painting, but after I scanned it and enhanced the colors in GIMP it ended up looking a lot more warm and vibrant.