Group members
- 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 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 compiled
- 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 burning the tracks onto a CD and then filing the burned CD, a time-consuming process.
GR1 Analysis. Put your GR1 Analysis on a new page of the wiki, with a link to it from your main project page.
- 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.
Doug (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.
- 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, the rest get thrown out
- 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 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
- The process of getting digital music looks something like: download the music -> burn to disc -> print out track list -> put it on the new release rack (for Doug in particular, he also writes an entry into his logbook, which prevents duplicate CDs from being filed)
- CDs are often flagged with some physical sticker (for example, if it’s going to get flushed soon)
- Doug often likes to play music on 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 would like to store the highest quality possible music on the system, that is, if possible in a 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.
- 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 added to the 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, a national reporting system on music which the record labels like; 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
- The World Music director receives songs from an eclectic range of record labels, and many of 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”, there is very little physical space, she wants something easy and simple
- Sometimes music they want they have to go out and get on their own, for example by buying it, 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.
- 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