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- Ian Jacobi (pipian)
- Dominic Kao (dkao)
- Daniela Miao (dmiao)
Problem statement
Briefly state the problem(s) that your project will seek to solve. Take the user's point of view. Consider what the user's goals are, and what obstacles lie in the way. Do not talk about any solutions here.
WMBR, MIT's community radio station, regularly receives promotional music from record companies to play and promote on the air, but due to the size of the music library and the large amount of incoming music, not all of this music will either get played or be able to be kept at the station. To deal with the incoming music, WMBR has a number of music directors whose job is threefold:
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- WMBR currently receives music through 2 channels: CDs (mail) and digital media (email). Every week Ken manually sorts through all the mail and places CDs into different genres by placing color-coded stickers on them. At the same time, he places a label on the disk cover for DJs to mark down what track they have played on air, and the date they played that track.
- All new CDs filed are entered into a log book manually or through an Excel spreadsheet. Many music directors use this log book to check what the new releases are.
- Not all DJs track their plays regularly on the CD label, so as a secondary source Ken uses Track Blaster (another system for logging the playlist for every show), but even that is not enough sometimes, as not all DJs are methodical about using Track Blaster.
- Every 2 weeks, Ken will take all the new release CDs and tally all the play counts into a huge Excel spreadsheet. This is a time-consuming and tedious process.
- This spreadsheet is then sent to all music directors, where they will use the count to report to CMJ.
- After 3 months, Ken cleans the CDs under "new releases", permanently filing the ones with frequent plays and flushing the unpopular ones.
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- The system must keep track of the play counts accurately (DJs playing tracks on their own time versus playing tracks on air - Ken only cares about the air plays, e.g. if at least 95% of the song is played)
- There should be an automatic way to extract the play counts with dates played, track name, album name, and artist name into a spreadsheet
- New releases should be tagged and displayed prominently, but the tag should be removed after 3 months
- A search system is needed with multiple condition specifications (e.g. "Show me all the new release tracks that have been played in the past week")
- The dates tracks were filed should be logged, and tracks should be able to be assigned can fit into multiple genres
- A logging The system should show what has been added/filed already, in order to prevent duplicatesbe able to prevent duplicate albums from being filed
User Classes
From the above interviews, we were able to determine the existence of two distinct user classes:
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- Look up number of plays per period
- NOTE: Actually recording plays is partly outside scope (as it is partly the responsibility of the playback system not covered here)
- Group/sort number of plays per album
- May also highlight trends over time (e.g. based on when the album was releasereleased)
- Highlight relevant subgenres
- Add extra plays from outside of digital playback (e.g. CDs, Track Blaster)
- Search for specific releases in a list (for subjective ranking of ties)
- Distribute to genre music directors
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