Songs are sorted into three categories:
- "A" songs are the best, catchiest, and most timeless. The ones you could listen to all day every day.
- "B" songs are the most interesting. Not quite good enough be an A song like Rebecca Black's "Friday" but not complete garbage either like literally everything from Insane Clown Posse. There are many B songs that are on the cusp of being an A song.
- "C" songs generally suck. But like above, there are some that may be almost or already a B.
Until March 2023, playlists were created that were 60% A songs,30% B songs, and 10% C songs.
And then someone said, "Why play the C songs at all? which was a good point.
The excuse could have been that there weren't enough songs in the DB, but that's no longer the case.
So now we play a 60/40 split of A/B songs and we have a "C Hour" a couple of times per week where you can decide if there is anything there that deserves promotion.
The Waves
Songs during the day used to be sorted by BPM using an algorithm to make a rising, then falling "wave".
While this sorting seems to work well at night for some reason.
It didn't work during the day.
What happened instead is that the same few songs sharing a similar BPM were always played at the same time per day.
All songs have already been sorted into day, nite, and relax by ear, so for the time being the day list will be random.
Jingles are still inserted into the day wave every 6 songs.
Songs at night are sorted from fastest BPM to slowest so that by the time the Relax wave arrives, the nite wave is playing its slowest songs.
Jingles are inserted into the nite wave every 8 songs.
Relax wave songs aren't sorted because they're already really slow. Think ... whales singing.
No jingles are played during the Relax wave.
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About today's background image:December 1955. "Arne Hemingway / the radio-shoppe.com premises. -- Nipple Peak, Antarctica" 1.5x3 inch dry plate glass negative
Early days of radio-shoppe. Thanks to our generous benefactors, we have much more palatial digs today.
One last thing.
Every day just after midnight, I hit up the API at:
https://sunrise-sunset.org in order to find out the next sunrise time for Paris and Ottawa.
This is so that my proggie knows when it should interrupt regular programming to play "Here Comes The Sun" by John Williams for a few minutes while I stand on my terrace watching the sun come up.
So thanks to them for that.
