calliope audio jukebox

help - the queue and random play

action queue space

modifying random play space

filters

by genre

ratings

pick n by artist

about the action queue top

The queue and the actionqueue both show the currently playing song, and what if any music is on deck. If your system has multiple channels, each channel has a separate queue. By default, the queue is visible in the main window of the home page, and in the bottom frame on the request page.

On the request page, the top song is the one currently playing. The clock on the upper left indicates approximately how long the song has been playing. The close icon () will kill the currently playing song. Clicking on the song title will show the song's detailed information page. The trash icon ( trash ) will place the playing song on the trash list (so that it will never come up for random play again). Note that trashing a song may not kill it - that is, it may continue to play (depending on your configuration file). The artist or artists associated with the song appear next, followed by genre(s), then the album title.

On the second and all succeeding rows, the user who picked the song (if any) appears on the left under the clock. If more than one song has been picked, the bump up icon ( bumpup ) allows a song to be moved up in the queue, and the () will remove the song from the queue.

In addition, the edit icon ( edit ) allows the entire actionqueue to be edited via drag and drop in a separate window. Simply drag songs to the order you wish to hear them, save the list order, and close the window. Note that you will only be able to edit the order for requests you have permission to change. If someone with a higher prioriority has picked songs, you will not be able to change the order of those songs.

Users have different types and priorities, and users with higher priorities (closer to 0) can modify the requests of users with lower priorities (closer to 1000), but not vice versa. It's therefore possible you will see requests on the queue without the close or the bump up icon, depending on your relative priority.

( See also: help - users, groups and permissions )

administration - modifying random play top

If you have the appropriate permissions (typically group "admin"), you can modify calliope's random play in a variety of ways. Most if not all of these features appear under admin->queue / random play via the web interface; in addition, these features may be affected by various settings in the conf file (more below, and see the conf file for additional details).

filtering top

Filtering can be turned completely on or off within the conf file. Individual filters have global settings, defined in the conf file, but these can be overridden by changing the settings for a particular channel via the web interface: (admin->modify filters).

Unless a channel is paused, calliope will continue indefinitely to pick music at random. If filtering is on, calliope will run all active filters for a given channel (the current channel is the one in the action queue). Generally, you want filtering on, and you probably want the default filters on as well. These include:

MusicRoot - Music roots are defined in the conf file. Each MusicRoot can be excluded from or included in random play by changing MusicRoot->Random to 0 or 1 in the conf file if this filter is on.
Trash - Files on the trash lists (one per channel) will be excluded from random play if this filter is on. Also, trashed files can be deleted from the system using calliope's command line interface.
Flag - For the most part, flagged songs will be excluded from random play, and in some cases prevented from play entirely if this filter is on. See the flag help for more on using flags.
Genre - Calliope can filter music by including or excluding genres (see below).
Artist - Activating this filter eliminates duplicate artists from the random queue - all songs within the 20 or so that are picked will be by different artists.
PickN - After the Artist filter above, this filter will pick n songs per artist during random play (see below).
NoDupes - The last filter run, this filter will eliminate any duplicate songs on the random queue.
The remaining filters are ranking filters - they re-rank the songs according to some property (time since last played, how many times it's been picked, etc.). SmartRandom is actually a collection of the other ranking filters; Mood is still in progress but will also be a collection of these other filters. Turning on SmartRandom or Mood turns off the other atomic ranking filters.

Developers: For an in-depth look at how filtering works, and how to create new and interesting filters, see lib/Channel/Filter.pm.

by genre top

You can modify the random play to either include only specific genres, or to exclude all but specific genres (if this filter is turned on - see above). These settings are applied on a channel-specific basis.

Choose admin->filter by genre to see the current state of the queue. Choose the genres you want, and select whether to include only those genres, or to exclude only those genres. This is nice if you're in a mood, or if you want to have your "station" have Jazz Hour, Blues Hour, etc. Note that the genres you specify apply to song genres (not album genres), and only songs that have the genre in question will be included or excluded. In other words, if you have songs that are clearly acid rock, but they have not been assigned that genre, and you choose to exclude acid rock from random play, you may hear those songs. You'd have to edit the genre of those songs to resolve this.

ratings top

Each user can rate as many songs as they like. Turning on this filter will generally caused rated songs to be played somewhat more often than the rest of the songs. If all or nearly all the songs have ratings, more highly rated songs will be played more often than songs with lower ratings.