Balanced song rotation, smarter artist recognition, and a built-in test run: ClockWork's TuneStacker now spreads airplay fairly and lets you check your spacing settings before you generate.
Nobody wants to hear the same song twice in a morning, or the same artist three times in an hour. Keeping repeats apart is one of the quiet jobs that separates a station that sounds programmed from one that sounds random, and it's the job of ClockWork's TuneStacker.
A round of improvements to TuneStacker, released as ClockWork 1.1.167 through 1.1.171, makes it fairer about which songs it picks, better at recognizing the same artist, and able to show you whether your spacing settings make sense before you generate a single log.
Before, TuneStacker gave every artist an equal turn no matter how many songs that artist had in your library. The result: an artist with a single song could play that one song over and over, while songs by artists with deep catalogs came up far less often.
Balanced song rotation fixes that. Now TuneStacker picks by how long both the song and its artist have rested, so every song gets roughly its fair share of airtime. It's a rested-longest draw with a little randomness, so it isn't a rigid quota, and it never loosens your artist and title spacing. Existing stations get Balanced song rotation automatically when they update, and if you prefer the original rotation you can untick it anytime.
Click the Proximity Settings row (the one with the shield icon) to open the ProximityGuard panel. The checkbox is labeled Balanced song rotation.
Libraries are messy, and the same artist often appears under slightly different names. For spacing purposes, TuneStacker quietly ignores small differences in how a name is written: capitals, accents, periods, quote marks, “&” versus “and,” and a leading “The.” So “R.E.O. Speedwagon” and “REO Speedwagon” count as one act, and so do “The Doobie Brothers” and “Doobie Brothers.” For song titles it also ignores a trailing tag such as “(Live)” or “(Radio Edit).” TuneStacker doesn't ask you anything and doesn't rename anything in your library. It simply counts repeats correctly.
If you'd rather settle on a single spelling for the songs themselves, that's what Librarian's Spelling Check is for. It notices look-alike spellings in your library, shows them side by side, and lets you choose which one to use for all the songs involved, or leave them as they are. It also catches genuine typos, like Carol King versus Carole King.
When you generate a new batch of logs, TuneStacker now takes into account the logs you've already made but haven't aired yet. A new batch picks up smoothly where the last one ends, with no repeats at the seam between them.
Choosing spacing settings can take some guesswork: set them too tight for your library and no rotation can honor them. Now the ProximityGuard panel checks your settings for you. Each time you change one, it rehearses a few days on your own master logs (nothing is written) and turns green, yellow, or red with a plain-language message, such as “Too tight for this library,” along with the reason. Each setting also shows roughly how many hours it keeps repeats apart, and Use safe defaults is smarter about choosing sensible values for your library.
After you generate logs, a one-line report card tells you how it went, for example: “Done. Closest repeats: artist 97 · title 604 ✓.” The numbers are how many songs apart the closest artist and title repeats came, and the check mark means every song met your spacing settings.
To see what the new engine really does, we generated a month of logs from the same station library, at identical spacing settings, twice: once with the previous version of TuneStacker and once with Balanced song rotation on. These were test runs on a copy of a real station's library, not logs that aired. The results:
The pattern is the point: the songs that used to be overplayed play less, and the songs that used to sit unplayed finally get their turn, without weakening your spacing rules. Your own results will depend on your library and settings.
These improvements are available now in ClockWork 1.1.167 or later. Use Check for Updates in ClockWork to get the latest version. For the full details, see the TuneStacker help pages, including Balanced rotation and the test run.
ClockWork builds your format clocks and generates your logs, with TuneStacker keeping every repeat where it belongs.
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