After last week’s unexpected break I was very much looking forward to this week’s show because The Algorithm™ began to be applied to other tracks as well! The current remix of Above & Beyond’s “Can’t Sleep” has been with us for 10 weeks now which is more than 60 days so we can expect to see it heading out of the charts, every week a bit more. Exciting! And fresh!
The next Top of the Week show will be on next Wednesday, August 17, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
→ Download and PlaylistChanges have been made!
Well, one change only, really, but an important one: the scoring algorithm of the tool I use to create the playlist for my shows. For every day, every tracks get a certain amount of points depending on its placement, and for the final charts all those points are added up and the top 100 tracks are chosen. At least that’s what The Algorithm™ has done before this week, and it didn’t really change much but in a very significant way… because now time (or rather, time in chart) is also being considered! So if a track has been in the charts for quite a long time (and I think we all know which one I’m talking about) its daily score is now reduced by quite the amount and I must say I am happy with the results. All the other tracks around that one track are completely unchanged, only that one track has disappeared. Perfect!
The next Top of the Week show will be on next Wednesday, August 3, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
→ Download and PlaylistHoly moly, I did not forget to record this week’s show! 🎉
I will have to do something about old tracks popping back up, though… not only did Tinlicker climb again (because it’s still in the Top 15 – almost 100 weeks after the release! Madness!) but no, Ben Nicky also made an appearance again and that will not stand. So I will develop something that will weaken the impact of tracks that have in the charts more often than other tracks and I hope I’ll have it ready by next week.
The next Top of the Week show will be on next Wednesday, July 27, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
→ Download and PlaylistThe most unusual about this week’s show was its length: 3h 55m. That’s 10 minutes more than normal! One reason for that is that I don’t remember a single track that was shorter than 5 minutes which is awesome. I like my trance long!
A great thing that happened was the raid by @funwithJapi, a Finnish streamer. They brought more than 20 people with them but unfortunately most of them didn’t stay very long. Didn’t stop me, though! 😄
Also unstoppable: motherfricking Tinlicker! After last week’s drop to #35 they were back up at #18 this week, much to @untermnsch’s chagrin. As soon as they will reach their 100th week they will probably break my spreadsheet… 🤣
I will play another Top of the Month show on next Friday, in two days, June 10th, at 🕚 CEST/UTC+2. Don’t miss that!
And if you did miss it, the next Top of the Week show will be on next Wednesday, June 15th, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
→ Download and PlaylistNot much to tell this week, there were about a dozen new entries, we had a new remix of a Ben Nicky track, Tinlicker dropped a bit to #35, and we got a new #1 with Ben Gold’s “Rest of Our Lives.”
The next Top of the Week show will be on next Wednesday, June 8th, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
→ Download and PlaylistI rewrote my chart generator tool and the code is now leaner, better to understand, and faster than before.
It also generates charts that are identical to last week’s charts… which left me puzzling for a bit until I realized what’s wrong and that the previous version of the code probably didn’t have an actual error. The three missing tracks were caused by a change in the algorithm, yes; however, the tool only ever uses a single algorithm for all charts it calculates, including the ones it uses to determine whether a track is a new entry. And because I have changed that algorithm before last week’s show, it didn’t tell me about the missing tracks because according to the new algorithm those tracks were already part of the week before!
Okay, mystery solved, code better than before, I guess that is a great success! 😄
I initially started messing around with the code because I wanted to know how Tinlicker is still in the charts and basically the answer is “because the track never really drops below place 31.” Well, if you’re consistently in the top third of a daily Top 100 you have kind of earned the right to be in a weekly Top 50. 🙂
Because there is a bank holiday tomorrow I have taken Friday off, and I will be playing a Top of the Month show! It will start at the usual time of 🕚 11:00 UTC+2/CEST to accompany you during lunch and maybe the last hours of your work week (in case you didn’t take the Friday off or don’t actually have this holiday).
The next Top of the Week show will then be on next Wednesday, June 1st, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
→ Download and PlaylistThis week was a wild ride. First one of the best tracks of the last weeks was suddenly at #45 or something like that (Plumb’s “Same Sky Same Stars,” if you must know) and then I discovered that I was missing not one, not two, but three tracks! Tracks that my tool should have told me to download but didn’t. And the charts themselves are looking rather weird again so I probably broke something when I added some functionality that lets me evaluate a track’s movement through the charts over time. So I guess I need to spend more time debugging that mess!
The next Top of the Week show will be on next Wednesday, May 25th, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
→ Download and PlaylistOkay, the second week with the new algorithm behaves a bit like I predicted, there were only six new entries. I’m very interested to see what amount of new tracks per week it will stabilize on and also if reducing the number of new entries makes the show less interesting because most of the tracks are already known? I have no idea, I guess we’ll have to wait and see!
In more important news, The New Cat™ is slowly, very slowly warming up to us three. Most of the time he still starts to run off as soon as there’s hectic movement but being allowed to pet him for a second or three is starting to look like a possibility! He’s also still quite wary of our other cat but at least during food time the proximity between the two can be reduced to almost zero… at least as long as they’re eating and nobody tries to eat the other one’s food. 😁
Also, Tinlicker dropped down to #46! Is that the lowest position that song ever had in these charts? Quite possible!
The next Top of the Week show will be on next Wednesday, May 18th, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
→ Download and PlaylistLast night, when I was preparing the tracks for today’s show, I noticed that apparently I was generating the weekly charts from the charts of a single day… which does give you a kind of nice snapshot but was somehow not what I intended it to be! So I fixed the bug in the software that I have written especially to generate these charts and believe with absolute certainty that my code is now 100% bug-free. Guaranteed!
I do wonder how this is going to influence the charts in the future… my current assumption is that there will be less movement because actually calculating the charts over seven days instead of one acts like a lowpass filter and thus should smooth out any hectic motion. Normally we do have around 20 new entries, and the generated list for today gave me 15 new entries which is a bit more than I would expect. But we will totally have to wait and see how this all plays out. I’m looking forward to next week already!
Also, Tinlicker is still in, nothing changed about that. 😄
The next Top of the Week show will be on next Wednesday, May 11th, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2. I might play a Top of the Month show this weekend, stay tuned for more info!
→ Download and PlaylistHuh, I never really talked on this blog about what happened and why I stopped doing shows… I guess I should really do that, and probably should have done that back in February already. Shame on me!
So, what happened? Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances (macOS upgrades, firmware upgrades, more upgrades, other upgrades) the SSD in my DJ MacBook died. The original SSD was way too small to contain all the music I had collected over the decades so restoring from backup wasn’t happening. Getting a replacement SSD for that particular MacBook was out of the question as well because the SSDs in those MacBooks are not standard SSDs. My other MacBook also didn’t have enough storage so it couldn’t be of any help, either. Sheeit.
After restoring basic functionality by putting in the original SSD I was able to put enough music on it to play the show in March. At the time I had already decided that I wanted to get the Denon DJ Prime 4 🤩 but held off on the purchase due to my then-suboptimal financial circumstances, what with being unemployed and all.
The weeks went by, turned to months, I found a new job, and at the end of August I felt financially secure enough to pull the trigger on the Prime 4. It was supposed to be delivered within 2–5 days which turned into 8 weeks at some point and then went down again and up and it was just like a rollercoaster, only I got sadder riding it every day. 😥
But, as they say, all good things must come to an end and so, last week I finally could hold it in my hands and it is huge, it is beautiful, and the outer of the three boxes it came in immediately drew blood🩸. According to my magic 🧙 studies this means it will last forever?
Anyway, I recently checked the software side of the whole situation, i.e. the streaming side, and I only had to reinstall one driver and recreate one configuration, all the rest still seems to be working! Of course, not using Traktor anymore means that I will for now lose the ability to show track titles on the stream automatically but that only means that I will have to enter them manually, like in ancient times. I am working on a solution for that, though: the Denon players expose a lot of information about what the DJ is doing but of course it is using a proprietary protocol named StagelinQ which will require a lot of digging and trial-and-error to figure out. The future might be bright!
In order to get back on track (because I really, really like doing the weekly chart shows) I think I will start slowly, doing maybe one show every weekend. The first shows I will be doing will be Top of the Month shows (starting with February 2021) so you can catch up with all the great tracks released in the last ten months and once we are all caught up (which might be in next February, I guess) I will switch to doing my weekly chart shows again.
Or maybe I’ll do both a show during the week and one on the weekend? I am not sure yet… it may very well be that once I start doing shows again I won’t settle for anything less than ALL THE SHOWS EVERY DAY but I have picked up a couple of other regular appointments during the week which I do not want to give up at this time. 🙂
Anyway. This saturday, November 6, 2021, starting at 11:00 CET/UTC+1 (for old times’ sake) I will be streaming the charts from February 2021, in the same place where it always happened, on my channel on Twitch. I expect you all to be there! 🥳🎉