Song Fight! Jukebox

[roymond]

You would think that with "all that free time" one would have when one is not working full time, one would be doing more and more songs, but it sure didn't work out that way.

I have spent the past 7 months validating this, and sadly...you're correct.

[Lunkhead]

I forgot about this, but, if you want to listen to a stream of random songs from the Song Fight archives, you can do that on the Jukebox:

http://sfjukebox.org/players/xspf/songs/random/10

That will open a Flash player (you may have to tell your browser to allow Flash) that will load and play 10 random songs at a time.

[Chumpy]

I've been having a lot of fun recently playing with the Jukebox. I especially love all the filtering you can do to explore the wealth of songs. One thing I'm trying to figure out is which fights have an overwhelmingly popular winner -- these are songs I want to hear. You can get at this by sorting on vote percentage. Obviously this stat changed drastically sometime after 2011 when the voting rules changed so you had to vote for at least two songs, making it impossible for any artist to get more than 50% of the vote. Does anyone know exactly when that change went into effect? The last fight I've been able to locate that had this issue was The Only French I Know, where Spud complained about "singleton voters".

Oh hey, speaking of filters, I've got a suggestion for a couple of fun filters to add: "total votes cast" and "total contestants".

[Lunkhead]

I always enjoy hearing that somebody is having fun with the Jukebox. Care to share the links to some of your filters?

Those filters you'd like, those are on the "songs" view, right? So it would be "total votes cast in fight" and "total contests in fight" song filters? That ought to be totally doable. I haven't been touching the Jukebox in a long time because my brother's servers had a meltdown and since then I've had issues logging in and updating the Jukebox, but I should probably sort all that out at some point...

I'm not entirely sure when the first "you must vote for at least two bands" fight was. If you've investigated it you're probably more sure than anybody at this point, possibly other than Spud or fluffy. Sadly, the way the songfight.org site works, the full voting data (which IPs voted for which bands at what times) had generally been completely discarded, up until a year or so into when I took over doing the updates. The only data getting saved in the official archive is the number of votes per band in each fight. Consequently I can't just look back at all the voting data and find the first time that e.g. one IP address shows up for multiple bands. When I realized that was happening I started saving the vote data locally to my computer when doing the updates. Later I built a way to store the vote data in the Jukebox. Unfortunately that is for now a manual step that I have to remember to trigger when I'm doing the updates and I don't think I've remembered to do it 100% of the time. This is an area with lots of "opportunities for improvement" to put it positively...

[Chumpy]

I used a filter to find "One Hit Wonders", or bands that submitted just one song, won the fight, and never returned. I then went and listened to a bunch of those songs and compiled a playlist of songs from that search that I liked and wanted to listen to again. A couple of my favorite songs from that list were by Cap'n Swank And the Jesus Monkey and The Next Contestant.

Another filter I call "Killing It Recently" (not a bad song title actually), which shows songs where a band has captured more than 25% of the vote. The "recently" clause is because I try to filter for songs after the "must vote for at least 2 songs" rule was instituted.

I have a filter I use to to show the Most Successful Bands based on win percentage. Of course where you draw the line on minimum number of fights you need to have participated in to qualify, which changes the rankings somewhat. I feel like 10 fights is a good round number to get into this club.

Finally I have a filter for Winningest Bands that just sorts on raw win counts.

Yeah, those two filters I suggested were for the "songs" view. I might use that for a given year to see which fight had the most voters, or the most bands participating. Or for things like my "Killing It Recently" filter, it might be good to say there must be at least 'N' bands participating for you to appear on this list, which would be another way of filtering out the Pray for Texas fight.

You're right about being "opportunities for improvement", but I'm really happy about the stats we do have. There are some more stats I wish I had access to though. For a given fight, I'd love to know how many times a song was played from the website. It'd be interesting to see how well the number of plays aligned with the vote counts.

[Lunkhead]

Thanks for sharing those links! They're fun to listen to.

Wow, some folks used to do this kind of stuff manually! That must have taken some work.

https://www.songfight.net/forums/viewto ... ant#p32322

You've maybe found this already but just in case Niveous apparently had the dirt on who Next Contestant was. That song is really freaking great!

https://www.songfight.net/forums/viewto ... 34#p147134

(And Bread Skeletons is Carol Cleveland Sings, as you probably already noticed. D. Sharkson is Boltoph, that's already a "related artist" in the Jukebox. Galaxy5 is one or more of those Canadian Gert dudes too, sounds like The Hip Cola I think..)

[Chumpy]

You've maybe found this already but just in case Niveous apparently had the dirt on who Next Contestant was. That song is really freaking great!

Omg, I really should search the forums more often, there is a goldmine of information in there. I made a Ficus & Baron playlist so I could hear all of their stuff. So far I really like everything I've heard. They're quirky, funny, and oh-so-hooky and musical. After hearing Standing in The Death Car I just had to hear all their other stuff.

(And Bread Skeletons is Carol Cleveland Sings, as you probably already noticed. D. Sharkson is Boltoph, that's already a "related artist" in the Jukebox. Galaxy5 is one or more of those Canadian Gert dudes too, sounds like The Hip Cola I think..)

Heh, I did not realize. I think true "One Hit Wonders" (who aren't SF regulars in another guise) are really rare. Even so, I'm really stoked to have discovered Ficus & Baron.

[Lunkhead]

The Jukebox has been down for a while, due to another lightning strike on the colocation facility in the SF Bay Area where my brother's servers (the ones I get free hosting on) are hosted. I don't know when he's going to have time to fix things. I'm looking into hosting alternatives but they'll probably take some non-trivial cost/effort. In the meantime I got it running on my laptop so I can at least use the tools I built into it that help me update songfight.org with fewer mistakes (like not getting the day of week and day of the month to match up correctly when setting the next fight's deadline) and pick random songs from the archive for folks to cover.

[Lunkhead]

I'm working on getting the Jukebox working again, hopefully I'm done and it's good to go but your mileage may vary.

https://sfjukebox.org/

[Pigfarmer Jr]

Cool. Thank you.

[Lunkhead]

OK, I think the case sensitive sorting thing you mentioned in the other thread should be fixed now, for sorting fights by cover artist name and artist name, and for sorting songs by artist name.

[Pigfarmer Jr]

Coolio. Thanks much for continuing to work on this. It's already been handy in searching and in listening.

[Lunkhead]

I just put out a teeny tiny couple changes to the Jukebox. On an artist's page, there should now be icons for each song that link to the song's fight's review thread, in a new tab/window. And the download links for the songs should open in new tabs/windows too.

Also I guess I didn't mention this before but when I got the Jukebox up and running again back in May I did have to hack and slash away some features to get that done. The Google or Facebook login stuff does not work anymore. Also I have not yet been able to get the user-contributed artist links from the old database to load into the current one, and same story for folks' playlist data. If you want to be able to sign in and make playlists and link artists though DM me and I can make you an account manually.

Also the email notifications about new titles, fight results, and new fights aren't set up. I think those had been broken for a long time anyway. Same thing for the automated posts to FB and Twitter about those things.

[Lunkhead]

Oops, I may have just broken music playback and stuff. Oy. Should be fixed.

[BoffoYux]

Also the email notifications about new titles, fight results, and new fights aren't set up. I think those had been broken for a long time anyway. Same thing for the automated posts to FB and Twitter about those things.

I always thought that would be a cool thing to have - A basic post on who won, and the voting results. I was attempting to do a 'video recap' of the top 3 with a few facts about the bands, but time always seems to get in the way.

I figured it would be a good tickler to people who don't often visit the site if they get a reminder of the new title and challenge, and who won the last one. Also a way for winners to have something to share on their social media posts. The more who know, the merrier!

[Lunkhead]

Yeah, it was cool when all that info was automatically going out to social media and email for those who signed up. All the libraries and APIs I used to set the Twitter/FB stuff got deprecated and/or shut off over the years so I'll have to relearn and rewrite all that stuff from scratch at some point to get those working again. The email thing was complicated because I was trying to send the emails via Gmail and that would repeatedly stop working also.

[HeuristicsInc]

The titles and results posts still go out to the RSS feed for use on feedly or whatever. Can that functionality be piggybacked to do what you want?

[Lunkhead]

Having a way to trigger sending the emails and posting to FB/Twitter isn't really the problem, it's the actual mechanisms for sending the emails and posting to FB/Twitter, which are brittle and require constant maintenance.