General FAQs about Deeper Into Music

Q Can you tell me how the music is selected?

A I could be politically incorrect and say a 70s catch-phrase like “ancient Chinese secret”, but I won’t.  However, it is complicated.  Let’s see if I can give you some idea.

Part of time I’m sitting in front of the computer arranging music in the order that make sense to me.  Part of the time a series of complex routines helps me pick music.

Songs are assigned “weights” and “rotations” ranging from 1-100 and rare, light, medium, heavy, or power, respectively.  Heavy & medium songs play more frequently than the others and songs with weights greater than 40 play more frequently than songs with weights of a lesser amount. (There are also some songs that are available only during special shows, like the Sunday Spice Rack, etc.)

How is weight determined?  Well, I initiate the weight based on several hard-to- explain personal assumptions.  Each time a song is played its weight is reduced by 1. When a song is requested, the weight is increased either by 1 or 2, varying by frequency of request.  Votes and ratings affect song weight and rotation using a complicated formula that re-balances the weights based on several factors, including request frequency, previous weight and weight & rotation history.

Your requests and votes make a huge difference in the sound of DIM over time. Votes of 4 & 5 increase a song’s weight proportionally, votes of 3 slightly increases the rotation but decreases the weight and votes of 1 & 2 decrease a song’s weight proportionally.  A no-star “dump it” really hurts both a song’s weight and rotation setting.

Periodically, I go in to the database and re-balance all the songs by hand, resetting ones that seem to be playing too often to lower weights, etc.

Finally, all songs are put into a range of categories and songs are picked from these categories based on weight and rotation.

It works something like this in order of selection:

1. Category 2. Frequency of airplay 3. Rotation partially determined by votes 4. Weight 5. Other factors like requests

These factors are sometimes shuffled for a few days and then re-set to that order, giving a (I hope) satisfying varying mix to the sound.

Whew.  Told you it was complicated.

Q How much does it cost to keep Deeper Into Music on-the-air?

A See this blog post

Q What are the Deeper Into Music Tech Specs?

A Dude! I get asked from time to time about the technical specs about DIM and so here’s a listing of most of them. Computer:

Computer:

• AMD Opteron 144
• 1024 MB DDR-RAM
• 2x 80 GB Hard Drive Raid1
• 3000 GB Bandwidth

Software:
SAM from Spacial Audio Systems rotates & helps mix the songs (http://www.spacialaudio.com)

Audio Processing:
Breakaway Live from http://www.claessonedwards.com/index.php with following plug-in enhancements:
1. Helium Spartacus Stereo Enhancement
2. Claesson Clunk/Slam & Bass Enhancement

Encoding: Base mp3s are encoded at 320 kBs using current LAME codec set at Very High with Joint Stereo and then processed through MP3Gain to bring them to a standard 89dB reference point.

Stream Encoder: EdCast LAME streaming at 128 kBs to a standard SHOUTcast server.

Random:
Time it takes to rip ONE song, encode it, and enter it into SAM and properly tag it w/picture, etc: about 10 mins. PER SONG.

BackUp:
Daily back up of all music & SAM code and settings. Twice daily back up of mySQL database.

Q Who runs Deeper Into Music?

A. I do. By my lonesome.

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