Hi,

I am trying to understand why while I am following the guidelines for the playlists I still have problems with tracks repeated earlier than it should.

I will try to describe what I have done.

I have 2 main general rotation playlists with more than 24hours in tracks time each.
Each one has a weight playback of 6 and they are 24h based

I have another one general rotation with more than 7h of tracks time which is also 24h based with playback weight of 2.

Finally, I have another one general rotation list with more than 4 hours of tracks time which has a playback weight of 1 and it's also 24h based.

The average tracks per hour are roughly 14. So I would expect to have played 11 tracks from the two big playlists, and around 3 tracks in total from the other two.

The problem is that I hear often the same tracks repeated even from the two big playlists (more than 48 Hours playing time of unique tracks) in less than 24 hours.

To my understanding, If I had only the two big playlists I would expect to hear 48 hours of unique tracks. Is it so ?

Having in mind that I have another 2 general rotation playlists with more than 11 hours of unique tracks, I should have not listened a track repeated for at least 60 hours....

Are my assumptions correct or there is something I am missing badly ?

Thank you in advance for your help and time.

There is also a random factor involved here, meaning that the same track can be randomly selected more than once during a day.

Centova Cast does have an additional mechanism, to prevent the same track from being played more than once, but, by default, it only tries to prevent the same track from playing more than once every 6 hours. If you want to increase this period to 24 hours, you'll have to tweak it a bit in the configuration file.

Instructions on how this works and what you need to change, here:
http://www.centova.com/en/faq/cast3/information/limiting_performances_of_a_single_track_in_given_time_period

Hi,

thanks for the reply but I am not the owner of the server, I am just a customer so this change can't be done by me and I can't ask the server admin to do it cause this will create a significant change to the server resources.

However, I am seriously thinking of buying my own virtual server and install centova there. What's the minimum server specification if I want to set this option to -let's say- 1440 minutes (24h) ? Please note that the server will support only one or two streams.

Looking forward for your reply

Kind Regards

System requirements: http://www.centova.com/doc/cast/installation_manual/01_system_requirements

We really can't estimate how much strain that modification would put on your server. That article is a few years old, and technology has advanced, so you might get away with it.

It basically boils down to MySQL performance -- whenever Centova Cast wants to select a new track to play, it needs to query MySQL for the past x hours of tracks that have been played on your station in order to avoid repeating them.  The greater the value of x, the greater the load on your MySQL server, and thus the longer the query takes to complete (which can lead to buffer underruns on the stream).

The number of other stations on the server has a direct impact on this, however, because their tracks are intermingled in the track data that MySQL needs to sort though.  If yours is the only station on your server, then you can crank this number up substantially higher without any adverse impact.

Thank you all

based on your replies and given that I won't run more than 1 radio station (probably with 2 different streams in terms of stream rate) I will be OK with a 1 core/512MB/Debian virtual server.

Therefore I have to decide whether is advantageous (financially) for me to setup and run my own server since I don't make any profit from this.

thank you once more.   

@centova
Thats why would a function to preshuffle a playlist much better than a     
RANDOM_UNIQUE_PERIOD!