Options to defeat music recognition and automation

Spinitron’s music recognition system (based on ACRCloud) automatically inserts a spin into a playlist every time it recognizes music. If you play music that you don’t want in playlists then you need to do something to prevent this default behavior. These are the options.

For the most part, Spinitron treats recognition as though it were an automation system so most of what follows applies to both.

Delete the unwanted spins

A DJ doing a live music show can monitor the recognition spins quite easily because Spinitron pushes them to the playlist worksheet usually within 15 or 20 seconds. Any undesired spin, e.g. bed music, is easily deleted with two mouse clicks.

The problem with this approach is that Spinitron’s metadata push (if your station uses it to update Twitter, stream servers, etc.) will probably push the spin out before the DJ deletes it. The spin will also be visible on the web and appear in the API for the time it takes the DJ to delete it.

On the plus side, this will always work regardless of configurations and it’s obvious so users know how to do this without training.

Disable recognition in DJ preferences

DJs can enable/disable recognition during their own shows with the “Insert from recognition” checkbox in DJ playlist preferences (cog icon).

If a DJ disables insert from recognition then the feature is defeated for the duration of any playlist belonging to that DJ. So when a DJ who has the option unchecked creates a future playlist, this effectively schedules recognition to be defeated for the duration of that playlist.

Alternatively a DJ may uncheck and later check this checkbox during a broadcast, knowing that some bed or other unwanted music is coming up.

Disable recognition for specific scheduled shows

The form to create or edit a scheduled show has a “Disable automation” checkbox. This affects both recognition and broadcast automation systems. It defeats recognition and automation for the duration of every scheduled occurrence of that show.

Allow the short spins?

In the USA, every copyright composition and recording you play on the radio ought to be reported to the royalty organizations, even if you only play a few seconds. So you could leave everything as is (except to correct errors) and therefore have the data to generate complete reports for SX and the PROs. Relative to the other options above, this policy minimizes effort and all you have to do is get accustomed to logging spins that, before you had recognition, you didn’t log.

Setting a minimum spin duration doesn’t help

We put a lot of work into making music recognition as fast as possible. Timely appearance of recognized spins in playlists is a critical performance goal. So if, for example, you play a 15-second promo with music bed then Spinitron is likely to pick it up.

However, the recognition system knows the duration of the recording that it recognized but not how much of it you’re going to play. If the recording used in the bed is 3 min 30 sec long then that’s all the recognition knows at the time it inserts the song into your playlist.

So we can’t filter out these spins on the basis of duration because, at the moment of recognition and insertion into the playlist, we know the song’s duration but not the spin’s duration.