Station

A Station is also known in the system as a Mix or Radio. Stations are also called Mixes in our Tuned Global solutions, CMS and documentation. These are groupings of songs that people can listen to in a radio type of usage. This is often referred to as lean back, where there is little input by the user. Users can start the radio station and just like or dislike songs. These likes or dislikes affect the remaining songs they listen to in this station. For this reason you can only ever request the next 5 tracks within a Pre-programmed or programmatic radio station. Access to the actual audio is user based and part of the Services APIs > Services>stations>GetTracks.

The items are not played out in the same order for different users, they are affected by algorithms on the back end. Radio can be DMCA or non DMCA compliant, in either case a user never sees a song listing for a station and you cannot retrieve all songs ahead via the APIs. If you are unsure, discuss your needs with Tuned.There are different types of stations, a number are detailed below;

Pre-programmed

These stations are preprogrammed with a song pool. We would recommend at least 100 tracks in this pool with typically up to 300 tracks entered. You can decide the theme of this station and its content. This is managed via the CMS, A user starts this station and it will play out as expected, taking into account user history and likes/dislikes.

Programmatic

This is also called station by seed(s). You can request to start a station by seed(s), this is normally an artist. The system will then start a playout of that artist and similar artists. Tags are used extensively to determine this similarity. A user starts this station and it will play out as expected, taking into account user history and likes/dislikes. This API is based on a user's context and is part of the Services APIs.

External

External Radio is a radio feed that is available from a different (not TUNED) system. You may have an agreement with a local radio station and wish to make the listening of that station available within your application. Where this feature is enabled, you will be able to create this Station within the CMS and then use the APIs to get the information to display and play this station

Tags

Stations can be grouped as tags, using the AutoTune CMS. You can then utilize the Tag group of APIs to get all stations from a tag and display these accordingly in your application.