[Roger -Dot- Lee(Admin)]

Originally posted by Michael Rawdon
I've occasionally requested a song several times in one week. The main reason I've done this is because sometimes the song doesn't get played until after I've left my desk. Due to the delay in processing requests (which I understand is partly programmatic, but probably also due to other requests in the queue), I can sometimes request a song at 10 am my time, and it doesn't get played until after I go to lunch at noon. I've come back from lunch on occasion to find that I missed my song by 5 minutes.

Actually, it's much more than partially programmatic. In our licensing agreement terms thing, as I understand, we have to put in a minimum delay of a certain amount for requests due to copyright/piracy issues. That is my understanding of why we do it. The configuration and decisions predate me, and, while I like to rock the boat on occasion, this isn't one of those times.

And, for the record, our delay is minimum of 1 hour. I say minimum, because after that delay, the request gets placed at the bottom of the queue. Any remaining delay depends on what's in the queue. If there's only two songs, then yours will be on deck shortly. If there's a whole bunch, then your wait will be longer. Also note that only the two songs that are waiting to play are listed. There may be others -- many others -- waiting to play.

Something else you'll want to consider is if there's a show running at the time. I see by your information that you're from Good Olde Silly Con Valley (I made my escape from Sunnyvale in 1996 -- used to live right off Central Expressway and Lawrence Expwy). Anyway, our shows tend to co-incide to your morning/afternoon hours. When a show is running, everything gets pushed back. Tuesdays, from 8am to noon your time are when we do the Gagliarchives replay. Four hours right there. And the requests back up fairly heavily during those times.

So you'll want to keep that in mind when you're making requests.

I'll also sometimes request several songs by an artist over the course of a week, because I'm trying to get enoguh of a handle on them to decide whether to buy their stuff. For artists who only have one or two albums up on AM, this means requesting tracks from the same album, of course.

Not a problem. We have no problem at all with this nature of requesting.

See, the difference from the way YOU request and those that we have problems with are:

• while you may request one or two songs repeatedly, once you get a handle on things, you MOVE ON. This, in our opinion, is a valid use of the resources.
• when you have requested (at least from the IP address from which you posted this note), you may hit a duplicate, or you may do two or three songs off of a given album. But that's it. You move on. Again, we have no problem with this. You don't continue to request the same song week after week. THAT is where we have the problems.
• You've come in here to help try to solve the problem instead of just opening Winamp/iTunes/whatever they happen to be listening to.

I could go on, but I think everyone gets the point.

In this latter case, I tend to make requests partly by song length (figuring a 9-minute track is more likely to give me a feel for the band than a 3-minute track), and partly by song title (if the title "sounds interesting"). Not an exact science, I know!

I'm hip. Although attempting to judge a song by it's title is identical to judging a book by it's cover. I can't count the number of gems I've discovered because I had a jumpy mouse at HP.

(FWIW, I almost always requests songs I'm interested in hearing but don't actually know; most songs I know I like I tend to buy the CDs of.)

oy, if we only had a bunch more like you instead of the two or three that request the same blasted songs daily.

I bring all this up not as a matter of objection - I'm happy to have AM around in practically any form, and understand why the moderators have taken the actions described earlier in this thread - but as another data point for how someone uses the request system.

Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's this type of use that we encourage. If everyone used the system this way, we wouldn't have these problems.

(In fact, there's a song on the playlist which was getting played seemingly every morning for a while which I simply could not stand, and I'm happy if it means we'll be hearing less of it!)

Which one? If you could give me a name, I'll see if it's being overrequested and yank it if necessary. Who knows, you might even get a round of applause from the regulars!

I actually rarely make requests, primarily because of the long delay before they get played. I don't often have a 3-hour block of time when I know I'll be around and listening to AM, either at work or at home (though once baseball season ends, I may have more such blocks of time at home!).

Yeah, unfortunately we can't do much about that and still be within the good graces of the recording industry. Although you might have better luck with the additional information in the above post...

Roger -Dot- Lee
Second in Command
Professional Spewster