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[Shasta Mcnasty]

Do you use Radio Mode?  Does it seem to really like certain songs, so that you get to hear Beth Orton's "Central Reservation" 4 times an hour?  And even though you really like that song, you have other songs that you like just as much that you'd also like to hear? 

Well, my friend, me too.  And I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be that way.  "Edit Radio Files" is the solution to your problems. 

Just go into "Edit Radio Files" and add a new rule.  "Last Played is not in the last <x> days" where <x> = your personal threshold of how many days you need to wait before hearing "Central Reservation" again. 

What, you say, that was obvious to you?  My friend, you are a genius.  It took me about 75 playings of "Central Reservation" to figure it out.  I didn't think I could take hearing it a 76th time. 

Another good trick is to use a "rating = 0 stars" rule to get only unrated songs, so you can then rate them.  Basically you can use any Smartlist rules to tailor Radio Mode to your taste. 

(I use Radio Mode because it builds Playing Now dynamically, which works well with xpTunes...otherwise I'd just use Smartlists to get these behaviors).

[Matt]

Good tip. 

Radio already makes recently heard songs less likely to be played again.  Maybe this effect should be stronger?

I use radio often, and haven't really had problems with duplicates.  Anyone else have an opinion?

[Shasta Mcnasty]

I might have been exaggerating about hearing the same song 75 times but not about the 4 times per hour.  It seems to happen even if I skip the song when I hear it a 2nd time.  Only some songs seem to get picked for heavy rotation, and it does seem to change each time I play Radio Mode.  But there's always a handful of songs that get mixed in much too frequently for my tastes (FYI, I usually run Radio on a seed of about 3000 files and with about 8000 files in the "radio files" playlist). 

[Doof]

Maybe it's just me, but if I have to resort to using smartlist rules to tell Radio Mode what to play, I feel like I might as well just create smartlists.

I personally use the Edit Radio Files field to just tell it not to play my Stand-up Comedy and Christmas files.

[boydn]

Late reply but, I haven't noticed a problem with dups

[Peter_T]

Stand-up Comedy and Christmas files.

haha... jingle bells is definitely a party-killer. 

[dcwebman]

I haven't been getting duplicate songs but the same artist many times.

[Doof]

I haven't been getting duplicate songs but the same artist many times.

Same here. I've often started up Radio Mode using a Metallica song and then listened to a steady and almost predictable progression of Metallica->Megadeth->Marilyn Manson->Metallica->Megadeth->Marilyn Manson playlist. Even this wouldn't bother me so much if it didn't seem to target the same 3 or 4 albums. Between just those three bands I have around 30 albums, so why it sticks with the same 3 or 4 seems a little strange.

Although not as strange as last night's choice. I once again started off with a Metallica song and it then played Megadeth->Metallica (same album as song 1 so I skipped it)->Marilyn Manson->Willie Nelson. I couldn't help but laugh.

I guess I just really wish I knew what it keyed off of so I could help it a bit. Sometimes it does a remarkable job and other times it seems it seems like it's just being lazy. I mean I understand that, if you choose Metallica as a seed song, then Megadeth and Marilyn Manson seem like natural picks, but I have other metal bands in my collection, and like I said, even within those 3 bands I have a whole mess of albums to choose from. If I knew which fields it used and how those fields were weighed in its decision-making, I could make sure those fields are filled with accurate data or be more mindful of the data I put in them.

What would be really nice is if we could have some sort of options screen to tweak how Radio Mode picks its songs, not just create a subset of songs it can choose from. For instance, I may want it to focus more on picking songs that have a similar Intensity, of BPM, or Genre, or Moods tag. While other people may want it to weight Rating or Styles or Year more heavily. So having sliders available to us to tweak how it weighs its decisions would be really nice. But right now, I don't even know if it uses any of those fields to decide. Even better, let us define what tags it should use to formulate decisions and how to weight those tags.

I just feel like Radio is such a cool feature (I love Pandora for instance) but it just feels kinda half-baked right now. I've set up this powerful PC as an HTPC and tried to convince my fiancee to use it to listen to music, but because she doesn't want to have to think to hard about what to play, she instead just tunes into the satellite radio stations we get through Dish Network. I showed her MC's Radio mode and she got all excited until it started playing the same 3 bands over and over. I explained to her about skipping songs that she doesn't want to hear and that it will get better about picking new ones, but she just wants to listen to some music while she cleans up after me. So Radio mode pretty much goes unused.

[Doof]

Here's a quick mockup of what I think would be the ideal Advanced Settings for Radio Mode...



With this, you could add any field you wanted into the mix, and then set how heavily MC weights that field when deciding what to play next. You could also set how tightly MC matched against that field. For instance, if I the current song's Genre was Rock, and I had the Matching slider all the way to Tight, then MC wouldn't deviate from the Rock genre. If I had it set looser, then MC would be more likely to pick a song outside of the Seed's Genre.

[Peter_T]

That would be fantastic.  It would save me a lot of time tweaking smartlists...

[Matt]

In build 471 and later:
Changed: Tweaks to how likely radio playback is to repeat a song.