TuneTracker™ QuickTip
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Tweaking Your Tolerances
The version of TuneStacker that ships with TuneTracker AutoCast gives you enormous power over the contents of your radio station's format. Here's a tip that helps you make the most of that power, in the area of proximity protection.
TuneStacker's ProximityGuard feature allows you to protect against playing the same songs (or other types of audio files) more frequently than you wish to. It lets you stack up to five layers of proximity protection. However it's important to understand that, as you add levels of protection, the variables that come into play increase astronomically, depending on the settings you choose and the contents of your music library. As a result, it's not difficult to give TuneStacker protection parameters it can't possibly fulfill.
Example: You have a music library that contains 1000 titles from 300 different artists. Therefore, it should be safe to protect against repeats based on two levels of ProximityGuard, set at 300 artists and 1000 titles, right? Probably not. Odds are you have many more titles by some artists than others, so you could run into situations where TuneStacker is unable to fulfill your protection criteria. You may find you need to trim at least one number back considerably, protecting by 1000 songs and about 50 artists.
Now, let's add a third layer of protection to our scenario. Let's say you would also like to protect against having songs with the same tempo showing up too often. You have given your songs three tempo designations; Slow, Medium, and Fast. So you add a layer of proximity protection with a value of "3." Should be pretty ok, but again, you might have many more fast songs than slow songs in your library, so when factored in with the other two layers of protection, it'll no longer be feasible to have a title protection factor of 1000.
As you add more layers of ProximityGuard protection, the implications can quickly become inestimable to anyone but a skilled mathematician. So how do you determine what levels of protection can reasonably work with your music library? By testing in Terminal! Next time we'll talk about how to do that.