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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:
- They receive and record incoming music and file it in the “new” section of the library.
- They act as a point of contact with the recording industry by submitting information about top played tracks to CMJ (the College Music Journal) from which lists are compiledand the record companies.
- They decide whether to file received music in the library or “flush it” from the library.
These tasks can be particularly time-consuming, especially for pop/rock directors who receive the most incoming music. Further complicating matters, record companies have begun to switch to digital downloads as a way to distribute promotional music. As WMBR currently does not have a digital music playback system, there is no easy way to get these promotional tracks played at all , short of without burning the tracks onto a CD and then filing the burned CD, which is a time-consuming process. Although WMBR has strong enough relationships with record companies to be able to obtain physical copies of releases that some stations do not, it is unlikely that this arrangement will last.
Observations & Interviews.
Give a narrative of the three people that you observed and interviewed. Don't use their names. Don't identify the users by name, but do describe who they were. Each narrative should include a particularly interesting moment -- a breakdown or workaround that exhibits a feature of the problem you're aiming to solve.
Names have been changed.
Douk (Americana/Roots):
Highlights: Receives music from the bin and logs them in the log books. Sometimes decides that something is a keep at this point. Files music in the new bins and comes to flush perhaps once a month, removing them. Currently receives digital media, but except for specific high-priority tracks, does not even bother downloading them, let alone playing. Does not usually burn CDs of digital media for playback in the studio, so digital media is often lost.
- The library is currently made up of physical CDs.
- Currently, he receives 5-20 CDs every week that he has to rip and enter into the library.
- He gets a lot of digital media as well, but most just get thrown away. Occasionally, he will play them right away and pick out the good ones to burn on the CD.
- Most of the time, he needs to find time to preview the music tracks before burning them.
Note: Names of interviewees have been changed to preserve anonymity.
Music Directors
1. Don:
Don is a genre music director at WMBR responsible for Americana/Roots music. He receives about 5-20 CDs every week from various record companies and handles filing them in the "new" racks. Don also receives a lot of digital media, but most of it gets thrown out; he only ever burns digital media to CD if it especially high priority. In these cases, he previews the music before burning it. Don also regularly "flushes" albums that receive less airplay (relegating them to a final last-ditch shelf for station member review), due to physical space constraints in the record library. About - Because of physical space constraints, they often flush out music CDs which receive less airplay, 10% of the flushed CDs come back to the regular racks, shelves the rest get thrown out.
When Don burns a CD of digital media, he has to - After burning the CD, he must manually insert the liner sheet (with track listings etc.)
- Sometimes this process comes extremely tedious, as the track information is not properly embedded in the music files (track name will say “Track 1, Track 2, Track 3 …”)
- It might also help to have the “digital liner notes” or a PDF/image of the album information stored in digital form
- Categorization of music is problematic, sometimes music fits into two categories (then two e.g. track listing). Sometimes the music files will come named generically "Track 1, Track 2, etc." and so he has to hunt down track names. When asked what he would want to see from a digital system, Don mentioned that it might be useful to preserve some of the aesthetic and non-critical parts of the media (e.g. album cover, album background). He also noted that, at the moment, multiple physical copies need to be made , one for each category) or into a category that doesn't yet exist
- The music director makes the call as to which category a CD get’s put into
for an album that fits into multiple categories, with each copy filed into their respective genre shelves.
The decision on how to categorize an album is decided upon by the genre music director. - The process of getting digital music looks something like: download the music -> burn to disc -> print out track list -> put into physical format involves downloading the music, burning it to disc, printing out the track list, and putting it on the new release rack (for Doug . For Don in particular, he also writes an entry into his logbook, which prevents the new music logbook to prevent duplicate CDs from being filed)- . CDs are often flagged with some physical sticker (for example, if it’s going to physical stickers (e.g. a flush sticker denoting this CD should get flushed soon)- Doug often . Don likes to play music on from his home computer, and he would like to be able to access the system from there, so remote access is a plus for him- Doug . Don would also like to store the highest quality music possible music on the system, that is, if possible in a , preferably lossless format like FLAC. MP3 is the low-end of the quality scale.
Bruce (Folk):
Highlights: Receives and logs new music, but completely ignores digital submissions right away. Is willing to use a system if learnable.
- Due to being very low tech, Bruce feels no need to use digial media at all and when he received emails containing digital media, he deletes them right away.
Lessons Learned:
- The entire playback library is physical
- Space constraints force a lot of "flushing" of CDs
- May be helpful to keep non-critical parts of albums (e.g. album art, digital liner notes)
- Music that ends up in multiple categories has to be physically duplicated
- A logbook which he writes in is the safeguard against filing the same CD twice
- Remote access is a plus
2. Bram (Folk):
Bram, the genre music director for Folk music, is the only genre music director we talked to that completely ignores digital submissions (he deletes everything). Bram feels if there's a system that he could learn easily, he might use incoming digital music. Bram is low-tech and uncomfortable with technology. Bram was part of a group interview and often did not respond to the questions we asked the group.
Lessons Learned:
- Some directors completely ignore incoming digital music
- Learnability is a particular focus for some genre music directors
3. Judy (World):
Because - Bruce thinks if there is a system that he can learn easily, then he will probably use digital formats more often.
Julia (World):
Highlights: Receives new music, but has never logged received CDs. May play or burn digital media rarely, but usually deletes. Submits to CMJ semi-regularly.
- Incoming digital music currently needs to first be burned to CDs before it can be being added to the playback library and played, it is more hassle than physical copies and therefore digital music is not as attractive an option
- The World Music director receives a large number of emails containing music in digital format (~10 a month)
- They get a lot of free music and promos because of the CMJ (college media journal) reporting that they do, Judy, the world music genre director finds it a hassle and rarely does so in practice. Because of the reports she submits to the College Media Journal (CMJ), a national reporting system on music which reports the record labels like; top albums, record labels will often send free music to the station (both physical CDs and digitally through e-mail). CMJ reporting involves going through the physical CDs and looking at the labels to see how many plays each CD has, and filling out a table, with some subjective opinion of the music director as well
- Currently, due to time constraints, she will either delete them, or forward the emails to volunteers of the station, who also find the digital formats frustrating to deal with
library and counting the marks made on the labels of each album.
Judy either deletes e-mailed music or forwards them to station volunteers who are willing to burn them ("elves"), but she generally believes that dealing with digital media is time-consuming and frustrating. She receives music - The World Music director receives songs from an eclectic range of record labels, and many of often times the smaller , independent ones cannot afford to send her physical CDs
- Labels show on which date the CD was played, which specific track and which DJ, lots of plays = lots of labels
- For Julia it’s often a “hurricane in the studio”, can't afford the costs of sending physical albums. Like the other genre music directors, Judy noted that the labels on each album show the dates the album was played on, as well as the specific track and DJ that played it. However, Judy feels it's often a "hurricane" in the studio, and there is very little physical space for her to work with, so she wants something easy ease and simplesimplicity.
- Sometimes music they want they have to go out and get on their own, for example by buying it, she Sometimes Judy goes out and purchases music for the station herself. She wonders if the free MP3s that Amazon sometimes offers can be useful
- Julia is a little discouraged that this is a “one-shot deal” project for us, but an inevitable artifact of this being a class project and not a real-world project
Other (but relevant):
- (Ian): Some physical form of the music must exist if it's received as a CD, if sent digitally a physical form may not have to exist
- Trackblaster is a way to see all the DJs and how many times they’ve played each track, but not all DJs use it
Joanie (Loud Rock) - if something comes in and she knows she like it, she will download it
- lazy, no time to download (so much of it, within the last 6 months or 1 year the number of digital media multipled)
- adding “fun” information to an album (pdf or digital liner notes), or even the email content
- concerned with the tracklist and manually find album art
- essential things are the record label and the year the track was made
- send in the CMJ report of the most played tracks (supposed to be weekly but no time)
- could use another person (assistant), wish music that gets sent to WMBR-loud will not get directly sent to her
- all the digital media go in somewhere, unsorted and into a different email address
- too many emails, tedious process
- how will the general WMBR public know the new music coming in
- downloads vs. physical copies
- User Classes. Describe the user classes that you have identified, and their major characteristics.
- High-throughput genre directors: May receive upwards of 40-50 CDs per week(?) Difficult to tally CMJ(?) Need to talk to Chris or such about this.
- Low-throughput genre directors: May receive a dozen CDs per week at most(?) Easier, more subjective to tally CMJ. Generally not as invested in the existing approach (e.g. may not submit to any CMJ lists which don’t exist for the genre, may not know about entering incoming CDs in a log book, may not deal with digital media whatsoever)
- Elves: Deal with all the physical burning onto CDs, and the labeling.
- * * Needs & Goals. Describe the goals that you have identified, with reference to the observations you made.
could be useful. Judy did express concern about the nature of the project, but mostly due to the fact that it might not be supported long term. Judy is concerned that with a system in place she'll still have to manually find the album art and track list, which is time consuming. She feels she could use an assistant to help her e-mails. Ultimately, however, her biggest concern, like other music directors, is letting the listeners of the radio station know what new music is being played.
Lessons Learned:
- CMJ reporting involves looking at each physical album and counting the plays on the label
- Efficiency is key to handling digital media, as the current system is extremely inefficient
- Finding album art and inputting track list is tedious
- Music directors want DJs to be aware of which tracks are new
4. Jocelyn (Loud Rock):
Jocelyn is loud rock music director at WMBR. She plays anything from punk rock to metal to garage rock. When she receives music in her e-mail, she'll only download it if she knows it will be something she likes. She's quite lazy in this respect, and often deletes the e-mails with music. She receives about 5-20 CDs per week, and wonders where all of the fun information (like cover art and backstory) will go following WMBR's transition to a digital playback system. Jocelyn thinks the essentials that music directors need to capture are album label, year, track list, artist. Like Judy, one of Jocelyn's duties is to perform the CMJ reporting for which albums were played most (on a bi-weekly basis).
Jocelyn feels that she receives simply too many e-mails and as a result ignores the majority of them. She wonders if a system which only skips the CD burning step will be of much use, since all of the other information (like track names) still needs to be input manually. Jocelyn feels that it would be great if she knew the music that was coming into a digital playback system, but didn't have to actually deal with it (e.g. the work of inputting information). She often gets triplicate e-mails since artists will send them to WMBR@wmbr.org, Loud@wmbr.org, and Jocelyn@wmbr.org. Jocelyn also uses the logbook when receiving physical CDs to avoid filing duplicate albums in the physical library. She receives approximately 15-20 e-mails with music per day.
Lessons Learned:
- Some music directors are unlikely to do anything that requires substantial manual work
- Music directors don't like to deal with e-mails
- Music directors wants to be aware of new music while delegating input to system/others
5. Lana (Electronica):
Lana is the electronica (also known as RPM) genre music director at WMBR. Unlike Jocelyn and Judy, Lana makes use of play counts tabulated by an assistant whom she referred to as "counting monkey" when reporting plays to CMJ. Lana noted that she sometimes make CDs out of music she receives digitally, in which case she has to do all the printing herself (e.g. album art, track list). In addition, when burning CDs, Lana needs to label them appropriately. She noted that labels are placed on the CD spine so they're visible at a glance (e.g. a black stripe for electronic music, a green dot for 60s oriented music, a yellow dot for heavy metal, a red dot for noise). Although Lana generally believes that nine out of ten digital downloads she receives are worth burning to CD and putting in the library, about one out of twenty times does she actually do so.
Lana noted that she receives a pretty even split between physical and digital music. She receives e-mails with a large number of albums from a record label, with some albums that say "digital-only". These are the ones Lana must manually download, Google the cover art for, and print out the various elements required in constructing the physical copy of the album. Lana would like to be able to "dropbox" the music she receives in her e-mail, at which point assistants ("elves") could come sift through and input the music into the system. The assistant that she has helps her with this occasionally and also helps with the station's digital additions.
When we observed her downloading an album, she ran into some issues, like unsuccessfully opening the zip file directly and downloading the file and not knowing how to navigate to the download location. She says that some assistants have made mistakes and forgotten things like writing down the release date or song titles sometimes when burning CDs.
Lessons Learned:
- Some music directors receive a lot of great music digitally, but the overhead of getting it into the library is too high
- Wants to control what music makes it into the system, but wants an assistant to do the rest
- The process of getting digital music into the physical library is error-prone
6. Calvin (Lead Music Director):
Calvin is the Lead Music Director of WMBR, and he has dealt with nearly all of the incoming music (physical CDs and digital media) at some point during his job. He receives an extremely large amount of digital media in his email inbox everyday (high throughput). He usually browses through the list of digital tracks, picks out the artists he knows for sure are popular at WMBR and burns the tracks onto CDs. However, currently this process is time-consuming and he only does this very rarely. Most of the time, for advance tracks, demos, and singles, he doesn't even bother looking at them and deletes them right away. Calvin notes that this is unfortunate because WMBR takes pride in the fact that it is unique in that there are no rules dictating what DJs should play. Furthermore, WMBR plays a lot of music from local bands and does not simply play everything that is on the CMJ list. However, Calvin noted that local music bands simply cannot afford to send out physical CDs. Calvin estimates that if there is a way to easily file digital media, there will be at least a 25% increase in the amount of music tracks they file for playback over the air.
In terms of importing digital media, Calvin is concerned about the time-sensitivity of this process because most of the downloadable tracks are only available for a temporary period of time, automatically expiring after a while. Calvin envisions that such a problem can only be mitigated if the importing process was straightforward and quick (Calvin gave an example of just sending the zip file to the database and the tracks get automatically filed). In addition, Calvin is worried about the security of such an import process. In order to keep up good relations with record companies and preventing copyright violations, Calvin believes that it will be necessary to prevent the links from being disseminated without his consent. With physical copies, it is not hard to track who has accessed the CDs, but with digital media there is no paper trail at all.
Finally, and most importantly, Calvin emphasizes the importance of keeping up the relationships between the station and record labels. He spends a lot of his time talking to and communicating with companies about how much their artists' songs are getting played, therefore play count information is crucial for him.
Lessons Learned:
- On a high-level, maintaining the relationship with record companies via showing the play counts for music tracks is crucial
- Transitioning gracefully from the now all-physical-disks process to all-digital-media (don't want to double the amount of work for music directors)
- An efficient way is needed to download digital media (or zip file) directly into the library
- The download channel must be secured from potential abusers that may cause copyright issues
- Trusted volunteers should be allowed to come into the system, rip CDs for 2-3 hours, then automatically log that the CDs have been ripped
Elves
1. Ken (Assistant to the Lead Music Director):
Ken is a helper around WMBR station, and mainly acts as an assistant to the Lead Music Director, Calvin. In our interview, he emphasized the importance of "schmoozing" with the record companies and keeping them happy so that they will send more music to the station. He is currently in charge of "counting" the plays of music tracks for most Pop/Rock genres and several other less mainstream genres. He walked us through the entire process of his part of the job:
- 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.
Lessons Learned:
- 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 can fit into multiple genres
- The system should be 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:
Music Directors:
- Record incoming digital and physical music and file it in the library
- Have a wide-range of throughput (anywhere from 5 CDs and a dozen digital downloads a week to well over 70 CDs per week)
- Solely responsible for determining whether digital media should be "kept"/burned
- May burn noteworthy digital media to CD to file it in the library
- Generally responsible for reporting plays to CMJ and the record companies (as primary point of contact for the latter)
- Sometimes responsible for counting plays on their own and selecting discs to be "flushed"
- Vary in which of the above tasks they do
- Some delegate burning, filing, counting to "elves"
- Some don't burn digital media
- Some don't report to CMJ
- Have a wide range of technical competence
- Relative novices
- Tech-savvy users of Google Spreadsheets and Excel to assist the current workflow
Elves:
- Generally deal with a subset of delegated tasks from music directors, such as:
- Counting tracks
- Burning digital media and preparing information on burned discs
- Filing physical CDs
Task Analysis
From the above descriptions, we identified several key tasks which should be supported by our system:
1. Importing Incoming Digital Media
Subtasks:
- Download digital media
- E-mails
- Amazon links
- Other online sources (e.g. Soundcloud)
- Preview incoming digital media
- Delete it if it is unwanted
- Send digital media to the server
- Verify relevant information from digital media
- Required:
- Artist
- Album
- Track Names
- Label
- Release Date/Import Date
- Genre (flexibly)
- Optionally:
- Cover art
- Liner notes
- Extra comments
- Required:
- Tag new media as "new"
- Optionally, during digital transition:
- Burn CDs of digital music
- Print out
- Cover art
- Liner notes/Track listing
Preconditions:
- New digital media received in e-mail
Time constraints:
- Primarily determined by rate of new digital media received
- More generally: Should feel like completion can be done in a reasonable amount of time, depending on the user (e.g. no more than 30-45 minutes per e-mail of new releases, no more than 90 minutes per day regardless of e-mails)
- May be able to loosen time constraints based on delegation of subtasks (e.g. previewing digital media, verifying information) and ease of remote access
Frequency of use:
- Between several times a week and once a day, depending on the user
2. Counting Tracks and CMJ Reporting
Subtasks:
- 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 released)
- 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
Preconditions:
- CMJ lists to be sent that week
Time constraints:
- Generally no more than one or two hours duration including addition of extra plays
Frequency of use:
- Weekly to bi-weekly, depending on user
3. Flushing New Music
Subtasks:
- Look up number of plays of albums older than three months
- NOTE: Actually recording plays is partly outside scope (as it is partly the responsibility of the playback system not covered here)
- Delete album if there are fewer plays than a subjective threshold
- Delete "new" tag from album if it is kept
Preconditions:
- Physical copies exist in the library
- Digital copies are less likely to need flushing due to lack of physical space constraints
Time constraints:
- Should be relatively short per album such that all albums to be flushed may be determined in about 1 hour for even the heaviest workload
Frequency of use:
- Weekly to less than once a month, depending on user
- Julia wants an easy and flexible way to categorize music by genre (sometimes one song belongs to multiple genre, and other times people make mistakes when assigning a genre)
- New release tracks have to be conspicuous to everybody
- Filing system to make reporting to CMJ easier
- Quick way to preview and delete unwanted music
- Direct method to import digital media into the database (through URL?)
- Grab music from other digital sources easily (Amazon, SoundCloud)
- Make sure the liner notes are attached to the album or individual songs
- Local music artists have very unstructured music files