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.
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.
Music Directors
Music Director D. (Americana/Roots):
Role: 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.
Music Director B. (Folk):
Role: 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.
Music Director J. (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
- lazy, no time to download (so much of it, within the last 6 months or 1 year the number of digital media multipled)
- 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
Other notes (not taken from any particular person):
- 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
Music Director 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 if we transition to digital, where all the fun information (like cover art and backstory) will go. Jocelyn thinks the essentials are album label, year, track list, artist. One of her duties is to perform the CMJ reporting for which albums were played most (bi-weekly).
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. We asked her if she wanted to be receiving e-mails from record labels and artists at all. She said it would be great if she knew the music that was coming into the system, but didn't have to actually deal with it (e.g. the work of inputting information). She'll often get triplicate e-mails since artists will send them to WMBR@wmbr, Loud@wmbr, and Jocelyn@wmbr. 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:
- Unlikely to do anything that requires substantial manual work
- Doesn't like to deal with e-mails
- Wants to be aware of new music while delegating input to system/others
Music Director Lana (Loud Rock):
Lana does electronica (also known as RPM) at WMBR. Another music director, whom she referred to as "counting monkey", does all the play counts for her genre so she does not do the reporting. She'll 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, she needs to do the labeling depending on genre (these labels are placed on the CD spine so they're visible in the physical library at a glance, e.g. black stripe represents electronic elements, green dot represents 60s oriented, yellow dot is heavy metal, red dot is noisy). About nine times out of ten she thinks the music she receives digitally is worth burning to CD and putting in the library, about one out of twenty times does she actually do so.
Lana receives a pretty even split between physical and digital music. She'll receive e-mails with a large number of albums from a record label, with some albums that say "digital-only". These are the ones she'll have to 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 helpful assistants (elves) could come sift through and input the music into the system. The elf that she has helps her with this occasionally (but not often) and also helps with the station's digital ads.
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 feels that her assistant makes mistakes and forgets things like the release date or song titles sometimes when getting the digital music into physical format.
Lessons Learned:
- Receives 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 her assistant to do the rest
- Process of getting digital music into the physical library is currently error-prone
Elves
User Classes
Describe the user classes that you have identified, and their major characteristics.
Music Directors: Some variance in throughput levels (how many CDs and digital music they receive) and in competence with technology. Their job is to put the music they receive into the physical library, and do CMJ reporting.
Elves: Deal with hysical burning onto CDs and labeling.
Needs & Goals
Describe the goals that you have identified, with reference to the observations you made.
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
Remote access of the system