I owe you an apology.  The current output sounds more repetitive than before, and sometimes the same track is being played twice in succession.  This is, obviously, rubbish.  Here’s why it’s happening (I warn you, it’s ridiculous).

TX3 and the previous test transmissions were all manually assembled in an edit suite, then uploaded to the transmitter.  This gave us control over how often a song was repeated – basically, if the playlist was about eight hours long (as TX3 was), it never got repeated for eight hours. From Thursday, we’ve been using the proper playout system (that’s what’s generating the scrolling text).  I thought this would immediately be better.  We had loaded twice as many songs, and could generate a 24 hour playlist instead of looping an 8 hour one.

It’s actually much worse, because the playout is in random mode.  We had to do this because of some short-term technical constraints, or we couldn’t have got the scrolling text working for another ten days.   But apparently ‘random’ does literally mean random: the system plays one song, then plays another one entirely at random.  It has no memory of what it just did. Sometimes it plays the same song twice in succession.  You might hear the same song three times in an hour.  Random.  (I.e., totally crap).

Apple had this problem with the random function on the iPod, and they introduced a ‘not quite so random’ feature to stop it happening.  I remember thinking Steve Jobs’s explanation of this was hilarious at the time, and never thought our system would be so stupid and make the same mistake. But it is.

I’m really sorry.  Please bear with us.  We’ll fix it as soon as we can and make it … less random.  So the output will sound more, er, random.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 27th, 2009 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.