How can this be prevented from happening again?
Please see the spin generated by auto recognition at 4:42:56 AM: https://spinitron.com/m/playlist/view/9682220
I canât see the spin and donât quite understand what happened. When I click on your link, the screen says âForbidden #403â. I assume it wasnât my showâŚ
Canât see the entryâŚis it one of the several bands that have the f-bomb in the name of the band? Iâm guessing you use Spinitron to feed your website with Now Playing information?
Hereâs the public link, @Rick_Hendra: https://spinitron.com/WMNR/pl/9682220/Overnight-Classics
It occured at 4:42 a.m. and while this is a song we are all classical at that time and thereâs no way it was programmed. Perhaps something in the music pinged this song as the one recognized by ACR Cloud.
Most importantly, is there a way that curse words can be put on a list so that they are blocked from being published in our Spinitron playlists (and on our website as a result)?
Yes that is correct, @Arbie. It was the name of the song.
(We air mostly classical, BTW).
So, did it replace a track or is this an extra track inserted without (apparent) reason? Either way, could be an auto-recognition error or a random glitch in the system. I am interested to hear what other possibilities Tom can find sleuthing âbehind the curtainâ.
Another possibility? When I run sponsor spots, sometimes they have a musical lead-in and it gets recognized and inserted on my playlist. And those could be anything. Itâs one of the reasons I always check over my playlistsâŚ
Me too, @Arbie. Looks like an extra track inserted without apparent reason. This has happened to us before, but not with a song title with a curse word in it.
Goo point, @Rick_Hendra. We are noncommercial and use no music beds in our underwriting so we can eliminate those from likely being the culpritâŚ
This problem came up once in the past and it is truly vexing.
The way I conceptualize the problem (a mental model, not a technical description) it is that the recognition system is intrinsically statistical and there is some probability of errors. And some fraction of the songs in the database has offensive metadata. Multiply these two small probabilities to get the chance of something with offensive metadata that you didnât play appearing in a playlist. It doesnât happen often but itâs bad when it does.
I confirmed with @Peng_from_ACRCloud that they donât have technology to help with it. If that has changed since the last time I asked, I expect Peng will let me know.
The only thing that I can propose is to incorporate one of the available lists of naughty words and discard any recognized spins that have those words/phrases. This would be an opt-in feature. Weâd write an automation log entry when it happens.
In the past I had hoped that we could avoid this because I expect it to work badly. Simple string matching is crude (pun, sorry). For example, one of Tom Jonesâ best known songs has a word in the title that news anchors wonât say. Is that ok for you and your audience? I donât know.
To give you an idea what these lists are like, take a look at https://github.com/words/cuss. Follow the link to index.json. WARNING: Not Safe For Work. Hereâs another https://github.com/RobertJGabriel/Google-profanity-words
The list requires regular maintenance and subjective judgement. Thatâs not something we can do. So the options are to incorporate one of these lists or to let you manage your own. They are both bad options. If we choose a list then youâre stuck with it, possibly deleting stuff that would have been ok. If we let you provide the list, youâre stuck with the problem of maintaining the list. Now factor in other languages. Even if youâre only concerned about a USA audience, there are plenty of people here who understand Spanish.
Long story short: I donât know how to fix this. If you want us to add a feature for deleting spins with certain words then we can do it. But we need the list of words.
Thank you so much for all this great information, @tom. Our GM would like to pursue the option where you add a feature for deleting spins with certain words. He will email a list of those words to you. Thanks so much again.
Thatâs done. No more of Jerry Lee Lewisâ most famous song :\
LOL - Thanks so much, @tom