The Quest for Quality (and a Lossless Library)

News

This week, we worked on building a companion system for Musicbox, Gensokyo Radio’s library ingest system. For more details, read on!

Back in January 2022, we first mentioned that we would be providing a lossless radio streaming option to our listeners, and with that came the monumental project of converting our existing music library from a lossy format to a lossless format. This project has involved re-ripping many hundreds of CDs and organizing them in a way that mimics our existing system through “Musicbox.” Musicbox is an internal system that has enabled us to add new music to the station very quickly. A single album used to take several hours, but with Musicbox it can be done in minutes where album metadata and artwork is on the website, and music is available for the rotation.

The only problem with Musicbox is that it is a lossy-native system, and it was built this way for two reasons: the bulk of our library started out as lossy, and there are occasionally digital albums that are only available in a lossy format. For that reason, Musicbox isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Enter “Forte,” a new companion system which helps bridge the gap between lossy and lossless formats. With this new system, we have a few goals in mind:

• Match all metadata between both formats for all albums where lossless is available
• Prevent “ID not found” conditions which cause empty live info on the site/app
• Transition the existing library into a lossless-first version of Musicbox in the future

This week alone, Forte has already fixed metadata between the lossy and lossless versions of 368 albums in our library and has even helped us fix some organizational errors. We’ll be pushing the updated library out to our scheduler shortly, and this should in turn improve quality and reduce ID errors.

By the way, if you want to listen to the difference lossless makes, become a listener member at Indigo by Gensokyo Radio | Gensokyo Radio today.

That’s all for this week! Strive for ever greater heights, and thanks for listening!

[Knowledge #153]

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