Cloud DJ Requests In Shuffle Mode
17 Jan 2012 | 1 Comment | posted by John W | in Tutorials and Howto
During the testing of the Cloud DJ request widget we have seen a few interesting use cases, one of them being having requests enabled while Cloud DJ is in shuffle mode. The request widget works with a special request tag and as I’m sure you know shuffle mode completely ignores tags as the idea is to play a random track. In this post I want to show you a quick ‘hack’ to enable requests with shuffle mode.
Quick confession, really this is just accomplished by understanding how the different Cloud DJ modes work and using this knowledge to our advantage.
Quick introduction to Cloud DJ play out modes
Cloud DJ has 3 different play out modes, Schedule, Playlist and Shuffle. These are all pretty self explanatory, however what is not initially obvious is how they ‘fallback’. For example, if you are in Schedule mode and nothing is scheduled then you have the default playlist to fallback on, if there is nothing in the default playlist then this will fallback down to shuffle mode. This is all by design and is in place to ensure that whatever the conditions at least something will be played.
Great, what has this got to do with anything?
With these play out modes in mind we can use the fallbacks to our advantage, basically if we create a single playlist with a request tag in and set this as the default playlist Cloud DJ will always attempt to load a request, if there is no request available then it will fallback to shuffle mode.
Still not got the request widget?
If you have still not got the request widget we are still looking for testers, to apply fill out this form.
Request widget development
We have had a lot of feedback about the requests and one of the most requested (no pun intended) improvements is the scalability of the widget, currently the widget is a fixed size but we are looking into improving the look and feel of it, watch this space!
This article was written by: John W
1 Comment
This is a very useful post about the request system.
Nice to see all the improvements in such a short period of time ! Keep it going that way !
Making possible to edit mix points for the audio files would be a major upgrade to the sound of the station. Cross fade time only option still doesn’t make the application sounding like a radio.
For now the only way to get around is trimming all the audio files or adding sillence to others and play around with the fade time option.The problem is that applies to all the files. It’s a good exercise to minimize the size of the files to send to the server !