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mattspringer · ‎06-20-2020

Similarly, it would be great to be able to give thumbs down to a specific composer in classical music stations

mattspringer · ‎06-11-2020

Thanks, some comments: First, the solution to the problem of longer individual movements and pieces being divided into multiple tracks and you being prohibited from playing multiple tracks has a simple solution that I suggested: avoid those performances in the first place. I know from experience with Pandora that for each performance that splits pieces into fragments, there are other performances of the same piece that keep them intact. I just went through the Mahler symphonies last night, searching for them in Pandora "add variety" with Apple Music open in a different window so that I could view which performances were subdivided, and removed any seed pieces from my classical station that were subdivided, replacing them with recordings of intact pieces. Similarly, Pandora content includes for full recordings of Appalachian Spring and Jupiter, and recordings of fragments of those pieces. The problem will go away if you curate your offerings in a way that rejects the ones that are fragments. I am pretty confident that none of your listeners want to listen to fragments of music that just stop suddenly in the middle. By the way, the complete classical performances station was my solution for a while but I gave up, because only rarely is a complete piece played despite the name, and the station is really annoying because while it takes thumbs up and thumbs down, it doesn't take seeds/suggestions like regular stations do, and despite hundreds of thumbed up pieces, it fixates on about 20 of them and plays them over and over again, requiring frequent "I'm tired of this track" clicks but doesn't take suggestions for diversifying content. And I tried Premium in the past and downgraded because it was over bloated and required too complex of a navigation, and the interface that surrounded cover art with a field of the cover's predominant color ruined the aesthetic intent of the cover art. Haven't checked it out recently but I want something that just works without me having to put in too much effort and lets me see the cover design the way the artist intended.

mattspringer · ‎06-11-2020

Most classical pieces are entire individual tracks, or individual movements are entire individual tracks. e.g., a symphony in several movements would have one track per movement. However, some long pieces like Appalachian Spring, or several Mahler Symphony movements, are long enough that some recordings have the individual pieces/movements split into subtracks. Pandora does not recognize the several tracks that comprise a single movement; rather, it just plays individual tracks (usually the first one in that multi-track movement). It's awful; a Mahler symphony movement will start playing and all of a sudden in the middle, bam!, you're listening to the beginning of a totally different piece. Some performances have intact movements and others don't. Pandora should only choose recordings in which movements or individual pieces are not subdivided, to prevent this from happening. If there is not a realistic algorithm to do this, then some human should curate the collection and remove recordings that are in subdivided tracks. (I've also heard Jupiter from The Planets start in the middle of the piece, at the slow section.) mod edit: changed title for clarity

Re: Blocking/Muting Certain Artists / Song Selecti...

Re: Please avoid performances of classical pieces ...

Classical pieces split into multiple tracks