How to Use Your SmartPlaylist Manager

Every member of The Conversations Network (including you!) has his or her own Personal Playlist, which is a great place to save programs you want to download and listen to at a later time. You can retrieve programs from your Personal Playlist one at a time or automatically via your personal RSS feed. You can even share your Personal Playlist with friends, to let them know what you're listening to. If you've ever used a service like Netflix, you'll recognize this as a "queue".

Programs are added to your Personal Playlist in two ways:

1. You can manually add a program by clicking on the "Save in Queue" button from any of our program's detail web pages.
2. You can train the SmartPlaylist Manager to recognize programs you like, and it will automatically add these programs to your Personal Playlist every night. The rest of this page explains how to configure and train your Personal Playlist.

You can train the Personal Playlist system to add all programs from a channel, programs from specific series, programs that match keywords, or combinations of all three. Here's how it works:

• Check the Enable box. This tells the system that you want programs to be automatically added to your Personal Playlist.
• Select the number of programs you want the system to try to add to your Personal Playlist each day.
• Select the maximum number of programs you want in your Personal Playlist. The playlist updater, which runs once each day, will stop adding programs if your Personal Playlist contains at least this number.
• You'll see a list of available keywords and associated colored icons. The meanings of the icons are as follows:
  • Green: ALWAYS add programs that match this keyword, regardless of the limits specified for daily quota or total Personal Playlist size.
  • Yellow: LIMITED. Add programs that match this keyword ONLY if not enough programs can be found that are marked Green to meet the daily quota and so long as the maximum Personal Playlist size has not yet been reached.
  • Red: IGNORE this keyword in searching for programs to add.
• To include or exclude programs that match any keyword in your Personal Playlist profile, just click on the item. As you click, the color will change from red to green to yellow and so forth.
• Click on the Select Channels and Series tab and make your selections there as well.
• When you're done making changes, click on the Save Playlist Preferences button. Only then will your changes actually be recorded.
• Check your Personal Playlist in 24 hours. Unless you already have the maximum number of programs you specified, you should see new programs added to your Personal Playlist on a regular basis.
• Come back to this page any time you want to change your choices for the Personal Playlist.
• Note that if you remove a program from your Personal Playlist the system will remember that it was once there and will not add it to your Personal Playlist again. If you want to add a show that you've previously removed, you can always do so manually.
• ALGORITHM: For the geeks, here's the search algorithm in more detail. The playlist updater runs each night and makes up to five database queries. First, it looks at programs published in the past 48 hours. Any such programs that match your green selections for channel, series or keyword are automatically added to the end of your Personal Playlist regardless of how many programs are already there. If this process doesn't add the minimum number of shows (quota) you specified and if the size of your Personal Playlist is less than the maximum you specified, up to four additional searches are performed from the archives. The process will stop when either the daily quota or the maximum playlist size are reached. The archive searches are performed in the following sequence:
  • matching green series AND green keywords
  • matching green series OR green keywords
  • matching yellow series AND yellow keywords
  • matching yellow series OR yellow keywords
  Within each of the archive searches, the system returns random selections that meet the criteria.

Return to your SmartPlaylist Manager