Today I noticed three different songs from the same artist almost back to back as you can see in the screenshots. So I checked my recent playlists and this has happened several times. For some (strange) reason Michael Bublé has become very popular.
Songs are picked from one virtual directory containing over 500 christmas songs of which 20 songs are from Michael Bublé. During the day 5 christmas songs are scheduled every hour except for the night. There are no other restrictions. Separations are as described below:
I did some testing and scheduled several days in de near future with the same templates, same problem occured. I checked the logfiles and for some reason Michael Bublé gets an overall penalty of "0 ".
I do think some bug has creeped into the Mini-Scheduler, I’m using 6.3.15 build 4450 at the moment.
For the Holidays I have been using a special music template for many years now without issues. Nothing has changed in this template or in any other settings.
As you can see in the screenshot the Beatles are scheduled 6 times in one hour despite the artist separation rule of 13 hours with a penalty of 3.
We will check that in 2022 when Torben is back in the office.
I have read yor precise thoughts all the days, but I have no idea what exactly can cause this. Good that you have checked the Scheduler log.
This is how it works:
If you are interested in the internals of the Mini Scheduler, here’s an outline of the algorithm:
First, all songs of the folder are sorted according to the time they were last scheduled, with those that haven’t been used for the longest time at the top of the list. Only full hours are respected, not the position within the hour.
If you specified any type or attribute filters, only the songs that match the filter will be considered in the following steps.
For all songs, the overall penalty is calculated according to the title/track/artist separation configuration.
The song with the minimum penalty will pe picked. If there is more than one song with minumum penalty, the scheduler will pick the first one (with a probability of 1/2), or the second one (with a probability of 1/4), and so on.
I have a similar problem.
In my case, the same interpreter is often planned two times in a row.
In this case the songs are always in different folders.
Yes, the Beatles songs are, together with another 8000 songs. The songs in between are all from one virtual directory and subdirectories (Christmas).
Thanks for your efforts Uli. I am aware of the mechanism of the Mini Scheduler but have not come across this issue before. And like I said, I didn’t change any settings.
This is the music template which was used when the Beatles error occured:
Every 6 songs there is only one with the filter 50-60’s, almost all Beatles songs have this attribute. Unfortunately I didn’t make a log this time.
The only thing we can offer you is to check the scheduler log.
I did it with @Gregor_G and we found out that it could have to do with his folder and planning strategy. Some details are not visible at first sight.
I will install the latest snapshot, keep track of the debug log and will inform you as soon as I’ve come across something weird.
Edit: I had to reverse the snapshot to the previous version as my skin.ini was not working anymore. Could have something to do with the new “Standard Directories”. Do we have to fill these directories manually?
No, mAirList will just use the default location when you leave it empty. For the Mini Scheduler log, this would be the ProgramData folder (as it was hardcoded in the earlier versions).
I just scheduled the music for the upcoming week and tried to save the MiniScheduler log file. As I stated before I had to reverse the update from the latest snapshot and I am now back on 6.3.16 build 4457 (my skin.ini was not working properly in the latest snapshot).
The log file opened automatically in the text editor but was too large in size to be viewable. I hoped to open the log file in notepad and searched in programdata/mairlist/6.3 but can’t find the log.
Could anyone point me in the rigth direction on how to proceed from here?
