I see no way to inidcate if I like a station or not - is this some factor of just how often its been favorited by people? My personal favorite stations seem to have 1.5 star ratings and that doesn't make sense.

I am asking me the same question.
Somewhere I read, that the Soundbridge is collecting information, what station you are listening and sendig it to the Roku-Server.
Maybe that stars reflect how many people are actually listening to this station? Or is it the favourites?

Hi,

I also started wondering how the rating works on radio roku. Not just the rating itself, but also the popularity rank.

R.

SunnySekot wrote:

I am asking me the same question.
Somewhere I read, that the Soundbridge is collecting information, what station you are listening and sendig it to the Roku-Server.
Maybe that stars reflect how many people are actually listening to this station? Or is it the favourites?

Possibly. My home network consisted of a 1001, a 500 and an Audiotron that I was still using after 7 years. I finally realized the main value of the audiotron was that it could play files off the computer, which in 7 years I have almost never done, so now it goes on Ebay, replaced by another 500.

Radioroku is just too good, and the one fault I had with the audiotron is it did not display what song was playing, as it dated from an era where internet radio was a novelty, not the norm. I also determined that this rating system apparently IS driven by total listening hours, and the audiotron was obviously not contributing to that rating. I just enabled "upload data" on the 500 that just replaced the Audiotron and now my favorite station is indeed listed under "Now Playing" though that "Started" value seems to be seriously off.

Well now we will see if how much I listen affects that star rating or not.

#2184 in popularity? I think not.

The star rating is created automatically based on two factors:
- how reliable the station stream is
- the bit rate of the station (higher is better)

this data is collected automatically from SoundBridges in the field, and some software we run that tests stations.

When a soundBridge is asked by a user to play a station, it queries radioroku.com to find the URL for that station ID that has the highest star rating. radioroku tracks many URLs per station. In some of the widgets on radioroku if you dig down you can actually see that different urls for the same station have different star ratings.

We do track popularity of stations based on how many hours they play (with a per play cap). This is not reflected in the star rating, but is reflected in the widgets that sort stations by their popularity.

anthony

RokuAnthony wrote:

The star rating is created automatically based on two factors:
- how reliable the station stream is
- the bit rate of the station (higher is better)anthony

Well I have a problem with that latter category.

RadioDismuke plays nothing but music from 1922-1935, all of which is obviously on low-fi 78's. Its streamed at 24 because there essentially is no reason to stream it at any higher speed. By your standards it will never have a decent rating based on that alone.

Since Total Listening Hours is used to determine that station popularity number, I would also ask why when I've had the station on for four hours now it doesn't show up in "Now Playing" And I HAVE enable data upload.

In addition, you have the primary stream with one star (as a result of the above) and apparently a link to the RadioDismuke source stream which probably got overloaded when people linked to it instead of the relay, bringing the station down, and had to be changed. Regardless, now when people try to play the station they get nothing.

Custer wrote:

RokuAnthony wrote:

The star rating is created automatically based on two factors:
- how reliable the station stream is
- the bit rate of the station (higher is better)anthony

Well I have a problem with that latter category.

RadioDismuke plays nothing but music from 1922-1935, all of which is obviously on low-fi 78's. Its streamed at 24 because there essentially is no reason to stream it at any higher speed. By your standards it will never have a decent rating based on that alone.

Since Total Listening Hours is used to determine that station popularity number, I would also ask why when I've had the station on for four hours now it doesn't show up in "Now Playing" And I HAVE enable data upload.

In addition, you have the primary stream with one star (as a result of the above) and apparently a link to the RadioDismuke source stream which probably got overloaded when people linked to it instead of the relay, bringing the station down, and had to be changed. Regardless, now when people try to play the station they get nothing.

Nonesense. Star-ratings are indicators of quality, namely reliability and quality bitrate delivery. The station you describe has neither, ergo not a multi-star rating. This speaks nothing to the fine music it might actually play, but it's stream quality/reliability is simply not up to par with it's competitors. If a few Roku users brought it down (silly implication), they need a lot of help.

RokuMark toggled the streams for you as the primary stream does not work anymore (made inactive).

It does show in now playing but if you are only showing 10 stations, they pop in and out really quickly.

btw, the star rating does take into account the content type. For example, talk needs a lower bitrate to get 5 stars than does music.

wideasleep1 wrote:

Custer wrote:

RokuAnthony wrote:

The star rating is created automatically based on two factors:
- how reliable the station stream is
- the bit rate of the station (higher is better)anthony

Nonesense. Star-ratings are indicators of quality, namely reliability and quality bitrate delivery. The station you describe has neither, ergo not a multi-star rating. This speaks nothing to the fine music it might actually play, but it's stream quality/reliability is simply not up to par with it's competitors. If a few Roku users brought it down (silly implication), they need a lot of help.

Roku users were connecting to the feed instead of the relay, as it somehow wound up with a higher star rating. Apparently someone was using their RoKu to listen directly to the feed and it got auto-uploaded.

I personally prefer the feed whenever possible, as relays, despite their backups, tend to be less reliable in my experience. There were shenanigans when AOL played with their blade servers a year or so back, and it took them quite a while to sort it out (weeks, IIRC). I lost confidence in their reliability even before then, but that was the last straw. RadioRoku has liberated me from much of these mundane tasks now, so I tweak wherever I can!

You say the station type ie. talk Music etc. effect the star rating does this take in to account Oldies as i notice my fav radio station radiofish has just gone to 3 stars, or is it just limited to Music or talk?



Bogget

The star rating will change with the more people who play a station, it will also factor in.

This is all terribly confusing for something that, at fisrst glance, looks totally explicit.
At least I can stop the lengthy searching to see how I can lodge my appreciation for a station.
If stations are to be rated, I would have thought the LISTENERS should be given a chance to participate.

A bit of a wasted opportunity, I'd say.