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Song Cycle is currently unavailable.  When it becomes available, it will be free.  Please send e-mail to songcycle@johnpaquette.com in order to be notified when it does become available again.

Generate your playlists fast! Stick to your format while providing endless variety. Easily comply with RIAA regulations.

Song Cycle Media Playlist Generator is a Windows program for generating formatted .m3u playlists for radio stations and DJs.

Song Cycle allows you to define a repeating program format consisting of any number of media items (mp3 is currently supported, other formats will follow). Media items don't have to be songs.

The program format is specified in terms of item categories. For instance, a format might be to play the following, over and over:

  • Fast Song
  • Slow Song
  • Fast Song
  • Commercial
  • Station ID

    Song Cycle reads the content of each item category from an .m3u file. E.g. fastsongs.m3u might be a list of all of your fast songs, slowsongs.m3u might be a list of all of your slow songs, commercials.m3u might list your commercials, etc. Winamp, from http://www.winamp.com/, is a great tool for creating .m3u files.

    Once Song Cycle knows about your categories, you can then easily define your repeating cycle in terms of them. Then Song Cycle generates your playlist by using the repeating cycle to extract items sequentially from your categories. Of course, you'll probably want Song Cycle to shuffle each category before it generates your playlist.

    Song Cycle allows you to place repetition restrictions on the playlist generation process. For example, say you don't want to play two songs by the same artist within any three hour period. You can simply specify "3 hours" as Song Cycle's artist repetition restriction, and the resultant playlist will meet your requirements.

    Or say you run a Jazz Standards station, and you don't want to hear two versions of the same song title (even by different artists) within a single hour. Just set the title repetiton restriction to one hour.

    Similar restrictions can also be placed on genre repetition, album repetition, and even year repetition.

    Repetition restrictions can be specified in terms of items, minutes, hours, or cycles.

    In Song Cycle, it is extremely easy to define and edit your program format.

    In Song Cycle, you can view the content of each category, and shuffle it at will. You can shuffle ALL your categories with a single mouse click.

    Song Cycle's category shuffling algorithm is fully adjustable on a per-category basis. At full strength, the new position of each item in the order is completely independent of its previous position. At low strength, each item only moves slightly from its prior position in the order. At a strength of zero, no shuffling happens.

    You can generate your playlist all at once, or a little bit at a time.

    Once your output playlist is generated, you can export it to an .m3u file.

    Song Cycle saves your category content, as well as the generated playlist, to a .scy (Song Cycle) file. When you start Song Cycle again, you can re-open the .scy file, and continue playlist generation right where you left off, abiding by any restrictions you set up the last time you used Song Cycle.

    You can also export the contents of any category to an .m3u file.

    It is also very easy to re-import the content of any or all of your item categories. So if a category's .m3u file changes, Song Cycle can be easily be made aware of that.

    Song Cycle is written in C++, and does most of its work without any file I/O. So Song Cycle is insanely fast.

    Song Cycle uses XML for its .scy file format, for maximum interoperability with other tools which speak XML.

    It's not a large program. It's not glitzy. But I think it is very handy, very easy to use, and extremely fast.

    Acknowledgement

    Song Cycle was inspired by a program called Tobasco's Amazing Clockwheel, written by Toby Sheets of Rio Grande Mud Media. Amazing Clockwheel is a fine program, but it hasn't changed since February of 2002, and it has some stability problems on Windows XP. Users of Amazing Clockwheel will see obvious similarities between it and Song Cycle. But Song Cycle is a completely new product, written from the ground up to be better (and certainly faster) than Amazing Clockwheel and any of its more literal imitators (Toby used to point directly to one of them from his own web site!). Toby has seen Song Cycle, and he approves of my intention to improve upon Amazing Clockwheel.