Hi, newbie here, so this may well be covered elsewhere. But how does a station create it’s own chart using the Spinitron playlist?
Thanks!
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Hi FlowerPunk I am sure Tom will have a much more complete answer but here is my take:
- Go to “Reports”, download whatever timeframe your chart is, in whatever your favourite spreadsheet format is.
- Work out some spreadsheet magic to add up the number of plays of tracks, 'cause it is hell to do by hand
- Share that spreadsheet magic, 'cause it’s hell to do by hand.
- Win the admiration and undying gratitude of us all
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Hi Timothy, thanks for joining the forum.
@Arbie’s answer is 100% valid and may work better for you than mine. Try both.
- Choose Search & chart in the Report menu
- Choose Search for: Releases (you can try the other options later)
- Pick a data range
- Ignore the advanced filters for now
- Click blue Search button
- On the right above the table of results, click the Chart link
Next you will be presented with the problems of excluding things you aren’t interested in and correctly counting together artist names and release titles that have been entered as spins differently, e.g. typos and style differences. Fixing this means editing spins.
For users with editor or admin permissions, there are ways to edit spins in this chart feature so that you can in effect combine rows in the chart table but it’s hard to explain these in a forum post. Best to do a zoom call. Please set one up with Eva if you want.
But if you promise to be very careful then …
You are hereby warned that this is confusing, powerful and has no undo feature. You can edit many spins in many playlists at once here with no undo. So fixing mistakes can be time consuming.
Alt/Opt click on a field value (e.g. a release title) in the chart table to edit it. All the spins in all the playlists counted in that chart row will update.
Check some rows’ selection checkboxes (on the right) and then click on a field value in another row to copy the clicked value to all the checked rows. All the spins in all the playlists counted in all the selected chart rows will update.
These two tricks work in the search results too, in which you have more sort and filter options. So you might want to have two browser windows open side by side, one with the search results and the other with the chart. Use the chart window to figure what searches to run in the other window, how to sort and filter them, and what edits to make.
We use the same tricks to help produce the weekly Spinitron chart. There’s a learning curve and it’s a bit different at every station owing to local practices.
Thanks for the reminder of that Chart function Tom. I remember having high hopes it would make our charting real easy, but the downside for us is that we want to exclude the 12am - 6am window which is not easy to do in search results or in charting. So we just export spins and sort by time first and delete, delete, delete. That’s easy. Because we don’t have complete control of song sources, release date and even CD title are often missing which makes for a lot of research (or going through “Did you mean” for all the shows for the whole week as we only chart new spins (6 months from release). We also try to discourage people from attempting to sway the chart by playing all or most of a CD by limiting the plays per show that count. (when #1 is often 6-10 plays in a week skewing the results is possible) Accuracy in the end depends largely on how much time one has that week to play with the numbers.
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We agree. Processing raw spins into a chart is a right royal pain in the neck. It’s not impossible. But is it worth the trouble? I have no idea, that’s up to y’all. ;^>
That’s too bad. We hoped that we would be able to create charts from our “feature” spins (new music) more easily.
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Have you tried the Spinitron chart feature and found it unsuitable?