A programming suggestion

[moses]

Not to milk a dead horse or beat a dead cow or mix metaphors but isn't there some kind of rule in the broadcast world where you can't play the same song more than once every 3 hours? I've heard this rule being applied on dreadful (I mean commercial) radio where you can set your watch by how often you hear particular songs.

I think 3 hours is way to short, you still might end up hearing it 3 times during your workday (more if you work crazy shifts like roger.lee) and at that point you just want to destroy the radio, espscially if it's a song you don't like in the first place.

Anyhow I agree with 24 hours between playings of the same song. What's odd is that I almost never hear Supper's Ready on the station. Whoever requests it daily must usually do it when I'm not listening.

[QuantumJo]

With the improved search and themed requests, I can see the need to not have the same song played too often. 12 hours seems reasonable.

[moses]

It just so happened that JamForte and I requested the same song this morning - presumably within minutes of each other...

What would be optimal would be if the computer sees two requests for the same song and just counts it as one. I mean, let's say that Jam's request happened first. When it comes up an hour or so later, does it matter to me that it's playing "Jam's request" and not mine? No, I'm hearing the song I requested, so I'm happy.

If it waits until whatever the specified time is before it can play it again and does so to fill "my request," that seems sort of pointless because it has already played and satisfied my desire to hear the song. (Unless I was away from the computer at the time, which isn't the fault of the request system. I probably would have missed it if Jam hadn't also requested the song.)

Maybe it already does this, I don't know. It just seems logical that it should.

[Roger -Dot- Lee(Admin)]

Originally posted by moses
Maybe it already does this, I don't know. It just seems logical that it should.

True, it might seem logical, and I'd LOVE to see something like this implemented, but from my limited experience in programming in general, this sounds like it'd be somewhat akin to a nightmare to code.

What would be nice is to have an additional failure code. Something like "This song was played at 0-dark-thirty" or something like that. This way, instead of just getting a failed message, it'd give a bit of a reason WHY it failed. Of course, then there'd have to be an additional entry in the database for 'last time this song was played' and the request system would need to query that field.

We're talking about some fairly significant changes to SAM.

Unless there's some sort of plugin or extensibility that I'm not aware of (me? Not aware of something? Surely you jest (and don't call me shirly))

T'would be nice....don't know how possible, but nice...