Gensokyo Radio Live #144 & Playlist Process Updates

News

This week, we broadcast our 144th episode of Gensokyo Radio Live hosted by Lunar and DMJ, plus we’re continuing to investigate and update the system which drives song playback on the station. For more details, read on!

During Live #144, we played more music that’s new to the station, plus we covered the recent happenings with ZUN’s Twitter account and his recent switch to Bluesky which has prompted several fans to follow suit. Our own account saw several new interactions, and this prompted us to update our #about channel for the first time since 2017. You can now find a link to a page with all of our official websites, apps, social links, and more by visiting the channel in Discord.

We also talked a bit about the station’s playlist selection process and our investigation into why some songs are playing much more often than intended. Since the show, we’ve continued working on this problem, and at this point, we believe we’ve found the root cause: restrictive repeat rules.

To summarize, there have been two systems simultaneously working on determining the next song to play: Azuracast’s native playlist system, and a hacked together implementation of the query we used to use on our colocated source server. Occasionally, our query would cease to return an eligible result because no songs met the timing criteria, so AC would take over and add a random song. Coincidentally, this would result in some songs ignoring and exceeding the repeat rules the query normally abides by.

Over the weekend, we applied a custom configuration file which more directly mimics the system our colocated server used to use (it’s no longer hackish and effectively does the same thing). However, as some listeners noticed on Tuesday morning, these repeat rules still resulted in songs not getting populated, and with AC’s native playlist system rewritten, the station went into fallback mode by playing a preset song from flap+frog to prevent dead air.

We’ve since addressed this by ensuring the query always returns a song to play, but there are still other issues to solve which we’ll continue to work through. Thank you for your patience as we work on restoring the station’s intended playlist behavior.

That’s all for this week, we’ll be back with more soon, and thanks for listening!

[Knowledge #184]

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