Scheduler Improvements & Discord Bot Development

News

Happy Halloween! This week, we worked on improving our station’s song selection process, or what we commonly refer to as the station’s “rotation” of music. We wanted to bring forward more of the music which has played less often, as well as emphasize newer music which (obviously) hasn’t been around as long, with listeners having less opportunity to rate such songs. As we’re coming up to the last couple months in 2021, this will give some of the newer music a better chance of making it to our annual Top 100 list.

We talked about Touhou 17.5 “Touhou Gouyoku Ibun” during our most recent show, but this week we’ve finally got a date for when you can grab this on Steam: right now! If you’re interested in finding out what “the most destructive story development like we’ve never seen before” has in store for the land of Gensokyo, now’s your chance.

Finally, we’re releasing a special project that listeners have been asking about for literally years: our very own, first-party, developed in-house, Discord bot! We’ve pushed back against this idea for a long time due to a preconception from the earlier days of Discord, where streaming audio in a channel was low-quality, mono, and not recommended for an optimal listening experience. But at some point, things changed with support for full-stereo and Opus-encoded streams, so here we are. We’re still testing this bot to make sure things are working well (think open beta), so for now it’s only available by request, but the plan is to make it available for anyone to invite to their own servers. We’ll be adding a couple more features to it ahead of public release as well, so sit tight!

It’s important to note that our policy on listening with third-party Discord bots still stands: Discord bots function as “listen servers” or “rebroadcast servers” which effectively obfuscate listener count and other information, and as such are not allowed. The reason we’re fine with people listening to our own bot is because we’re able to handle listener statistics directly, and without worrying about the headaches of satisfying GDPR conditions when it comes to third-party data handling.

A special thanks to @CactusPie#0864 who finally pushed me over the edge and got this subproject rolling, and thanks to everyone for listening!

[Knowledge #37]

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