Music: rules

Everything you need in order to understand and influence your score: the six steps, the maths behind them, the three modes, what counts as a hit, streak and level, and how to import your own playlists.

Goal of the game

You hear a very short snippet of a song and have to name it. You get six attempts, and every miss makes the snippet longer. The shorter the snippet that was enough for you, the more points you score. You do not play against some foreign catalogue but against the playlists you select yourself.

How a game runs

1. Pick one or more playlists under "Your selection". The line below tells you how many tracks that adds up to.
2. Pick a mode and press "Play". The song is drawn at random from your selection; your browser is never told which one it is.
3. Press "Play" on the snippet. On the first attempt you hear half a second. You may listen as often as you like, but every replay after the first costs points.
4. Type into the field below. Only what is actually in your selection is suggested; the search works word by word, so "wonder stevie" also finds "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder. Confirm with "Guess", or press "Skip".
5. After a miss or a skip the snippet grows and you move on to the next attempt. After the sixth the round is over, and the reveal shows title, artist, cover and everything else known about the song.

What the colours of your attempts mean

Every used attempt stays on screen as a line, and its colour says what became of it. This is the only partial feedback in the game: it tells you whether you are looking in the right corner, and nothing beyond that.

• Red: wrong. Neither the song nor the artist match.
• Yellow, with the artist underlined: the song is wrong but the artist is right. The song you are after is a different one by the same act, and the line says so with "Artist is right" next to it.
• Grey and italic: skipped. Not a guess but an omission.
• In the artist mode there is no yellow: there the artist is the question, so a match would already be the answer.
• The same colours appear later in the history, so a game you look up again looks the way it felt.

What counts as a hit

You do not guess freely but from a list of suggestions. What appears in it comes from your selection, and only what you click there is submitted as an attempt. Typed and discarded counts for nothing.

• What is compared is the recording, not the row. The same track sits with the provider under several identifiers once it has appeared on several albums; all of them count as correct. Pick the album that was not drawn and you still get your point.
• The search runs word by word across title and artist at once, and every piece has to appear somewhere. "wonder stevie" therefore finds "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder, and a single remembered word is often enough.
• In the artist question the list holds every artist exactly once, even if they have twenty tracks in your selection. Otherwise the length of the list would itself be a clue.
• Your browser does not learn which track is being asked for until the round is over. It receives the address of the snippet and its length, nothing else; title, artist and the rest arrive with the reveal, won or lost.
• During a round no third-party service is contacted. The snippet sits in our own storage, and the address to it is produced without a single outbound call.

The six steps

Every step starts at the same point and grows towards the end. The last one is the full snippet the provider delivers.

Every step is a real cut, not a fade: what you did not hear in half a second, you did not hear. The first step was once planned at a tenth of a second and was raised to half a second, because for many songs a tenth is simply noise. A step nobody can solve is not a step, it is a wasted attempt.

The snippet does not start at the beginning of the song. The 30 second preview is editorially chosen and usually sits in the most recognisable part, often around the chorus. An intro of four bars of silence would otherwise be unplayable. The starting point is fixed per song so that two results stay comparable.

The three modes

You choose one before every game. They differ in what is being asked for and over how many rounds.

• Guess the track: One round, the song is what you are after. Full score, up to 100 points.
• Guess the artist: One round, only the artist is asked for. That is easier, so points count with a factor of 0.6, up to 60. The suggestion list holds every artist exactly once, even if they have twenty songs in your selection.
• Series: Five rounds in a row, the song each time. Up to 500 points in total. The series is only saved at the end: abandoning it leaves no record.

Scoring

100 points, minus 15 for every miss, minus 5 for every replay after the first. It never goes below 0. Not getting the song at all scores 0.

• The first listen is free. Without it nobody can guess, and charging for the one action that makes the game possible would be charging for taking part.
• The winning guess is free. You pay for being wrong, not for being right. Listen once and get it immediately and you score the full 100.
• A skip uses up an attempt and costs the same 15 points as a wrong guess. It is not a shortcut, only the faster way to the next step.
• Time does not count. Whether you think for two seconds or two minutes changes nothing. A game that forces you to rush makes listening again pointless, and that is what this game is about.
• In the artist mode all points are multiplied by 0.6, because an artist is easier to recognise than one particular song.
• The calculation happens on the server. Your browser reports what you clicked and how often you listened; the points are produced there and are not in your hands.

The table assumes exactly one listen per step. Listen more often and you end up below it. After every round the result window shows how the score came about: points, attempts and replays, plus a ring showing the share of what was achievable.

Streak, level and history

• You can play without an account. Your games are still stored, but they belong to nobody, and there is no progress and no history.
• Signed in, every finished game counts a tenth of its points as experience. A single round therefore brings 0 to 10, a series 0 to 50.
• The first level up costs 20 experience points, the second 40. After that the price grows ever more slowly and approaches 500: the step from level 10 to 11 costs 173, the one from 20 to 21 costs 286. Experience itself is a single number across all games.
• The flame burns on every day you played. A day runs from midnight to midnight German time, and if you last played yesterday your streak survives and you can continue it today.
• The streak applies to Musik only: playing Calculator today does not feed your Musik streak.
• The history holds every game together with how you solved it: which songs were asked for and what you guessed when. A game cannot be replayed, but it can be listened to again: one button per round plays the snippet in full length.

Importing and managing playlists

There are two kinds of playlist. Public ones are created by the site owner and are open to everyone, even without an account. Your own ones you create yourself, and only you can see them.

• The simple way: paste the address of a public Deezer playlist under "My playlists". That is all it takes.
• If your playlist lives elsewhere, for instance on Spotify, the Deezer transfer service converts it. The resulting address goes into the same field. The link to it sits next to the input.
• The second way is a pasted track list: one line per song, in the form "Artist - Title" or "Title - Artist". Both readings are tried. Lines that cannot be resolved are shown to you verbatim instead of disappearing silently.
• Importing runs in the background and shows you progress and remaining time. You can leave the page while it works.
• Every list can be renamed, and the original name is kept. Refreshing fetches the current version from the provider and does not undo your rename.
• Deleting is final: the playlist disappears from your selection. Games you have already played are not affected and can still be listened to again.

Limits

• A game needs at least 10 playable songs in the selection. Play against six songs and you know them by heart after two games.
• The upper end is 10,000 tracks. Select more and you play against the first 10,000, and you are told so.
• Not every song is playable. The provider does not deliver a snippet for every track, and some are blocked regionally. A playlist without a single playable track is not created in the first place.
• When a lot is being imported at once, a note appears at the top of the start page. You can still play; only a new import has to wait.
• No song appears twice within a series. The five rounds draw five different songs, which is why a series also needs more than five playable songs in the selection.

Tips

• Listen to the first step two or three times before guessing. Five points per replay is cheaper than 15 for a miss.
• Guess blind when you have a hunch. A guess on the first attempt costs nothing if it lands and 15 points if it does not. Wait until the fourth step and you have already lost 45 for certain.
• Skipping pays off when you know for sure that you recognise nothing. It costs the same as a wrong guess but takes you to the next step without a detour.
• Do not select everything at once. Against 5,000 tracks almost every song is a stranger; against a playlist you know, guessing turns into recognising.
• Use the search in the input. It looks through title and artist at the same time, word by word, and every word has to appear somewhere. A single remembered word is often enough.
• If you recognise the artist but not the song, play the artist mode. It scores less, but you land far earlier.
• Use a yellow line. It tells you the artist is right, and in the input below you can go looking for their other songs: one word of their name lists them all.
• Play a playlist you put together yourself. Against someone else's list you are guessing, against your own you are remembering, and that difference shows up in the result far more than any trick with the replay button.