What Is Your Station's Actual Format?
by Jesus Rodriguez - Are you sure your station is the format you think it is? Whether it’s the genre in general that you play or how the different sub-genres play on your station, I’d like to take you through an exercise to so you understand exactly what your format at this moment.
I often get calls from users saying that they hear too much R&B on a Hip Hop station, the CHR station is playing too much Urban music, the bilingual station is playing more English music than average, the rock station sounds too alternative, etc. I usually get these calls the most right after music test results have been implemented or when there’s a wave of music shifting in the format. When I get a call saying "Jesus I just can’t have this playing so much, we aren’t that kind of format!”, rather than giving a verbal response, I show the user the facts. You can do the same.
I hear it all the time, “My station needs to be 50/50, 60/40, 70/30, etc.” If you ever question whether your station’s mood, tempo, amount of songs by an artist, sound codes, or just about anything is off (where you hear more of one over the others), there is a feature that will be helpful to you. Right-click on any field and click on Library Analysis. You will get a window similar to this one below giving you the numbers for those items currently in your library view...
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Hearing Is Believing: Give Your Log A Listen Before You Send It
by Dave Tyler -
As programmers, we all schedule our music and then “massage” it - or check it out to fill any unscheduled positions and just give it a good once over to make sure tomorrow’s music will sound the way it should. Some programmers just schedule and send the log, while others will take an hour or more to look over every transition. I will say this up front, MusicMaster gives you all of the tools you could possibly need to basically schedule, check for any unscheduled positions, and send a great log. If your database is built well from the category level up through your clocks, grids and into well thought-out coding and rules, then there should be very little left to do after hitting “Auto-Schedule”. With all of that said, the prideful Programmer still wants to make sure he/she is sending the best product. I would like to suggest a great way to “Listen” to your log!
Before being able to listen to your log you are going to need to link your song cards to the actual audio. This can be done via Audio File Settings in Tools/Options. Once your Audio Files are setup, then you can open a scheduled log. In my example, I right click on Shannon Lawson, then select Audio, and I get a lot of different options as you can see below:
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