Extra channels tech. question

[Route 222]

I'm interested to learn from a technical perspective why some of Sirius' extra app channels allow you to skip songs while others don't. It seems that the ones that do are not actual live "radio" feeds per se but rather act almost like Pandora stations. I'm guessing they just load a bunch of songs in a playlist and every time a listener plays one of those channels, it plays things at random like a Pandora station while the regular channels are actual live feeds? Seems that way.

 

[Don CT]

I'm interested to learn from a technical perspective why some of Sirius' extra app channels allow you to skip songs while others don't. It seems that the ones that do are not actual live "radio" feeds per se but rather act almost like Pandora stations. I'm guessing they just load a bunch of songs in a playlist and every time a listener plays one of those channels, it plays things at random like a Pandora station while the regular channels are actual live feeds? Seems that way.

The extra channels are basically stream only and not off of the satellite.

 

[radiodog2]

Basically the XTRA channels are just Pandora stations programmed with a specific format and certain number of songs set to random.

 

[Mediafrog+]

Basically the XTRA channels are just Pandora stations programmed with a specific format and certain number of songs set to random.

I’ve discovered that a number of the XTRA channels have very shallow playlists, with the same songs repeating after two hours, and on some channels only an hour later. Hundred-foot wide variety that’s an inch deep.

 

[K6JHU]

I thought I was the only one who believes that their Playlist is a mile wide and an inch deep. However some channels like Sirius XM Pops seem to be deeper only because of the wide variety of material available

 

[Casey]

I've actually noticed the playlist is sort of wide on the stations I have listened to. But the algorithm seems to be completely crap. It's definitely not random. Some songs will play every couple hours while others may not play for days. And it seems like every time you restart the player, it will favor the heavy rotation songs again.

 

[CTListener]

They're going for the lowest-common-denominator, non-chart-geek, non-radio-geek, non-playlist-aware listener. That's probably 95 percent of the subscribers, maybe more, which is why complaints like the above are ignored.

 

[theman8410]

I have noticed many times that the rotation between categories of the genres will become out of sorts overnight. For example, the system may get stuck on gold or recurrents instead of mixing all the categories properly. An example would be Caliente, where they may play 30 minutes of salsa, instead of mixing in reggaeton, bachata, etc. Normally you would hear 2 songs at most in each category.