MusicMaster Blog
Using Schedule Ready Check: Hour Timing, Airplay Contracts and more geposted von Laurie Knapp am Juli 11th, 2022
Using Schedule Ready Check: Hour Timing, Airplay Contracts and more!
By Laurie Knapp
MusicMaster has several tools you can employ after the Scheduling process to ensure your logs meet your standards and are good to go. One you may be familiar with is Check the Log, which makes sure you aren’t sending out a log with any remaining unwanted rule violations. You can learn more about here (https://musicmaster.com/?p=8115).
Another tool, called Schedule Ready Check, will help you see if other important criteria have been met. For example, you can check for missing audio or loose traffic spots, ensure your Airplay Contracts are being met, and that your hours and days are timing out as you expect.
If you don’t already see the Ready Check button in your Schedule Calendar operations toolbar, you can add it. Right click the toolbar and select Customize.
Then, find Ready Check in the left-hand list of Operation Buttons and use the > arrow or drag it into the list on the right. You can place it anywhere in the list you’d like.
You can also right click on any day in your Schedule Calendar and select Perform Ready Check from the context menu.
When you launch Ready Check, you can see the various options available in the window below.
First, you’ll select a time period for the logs you wish to examine. By default, it will pick the day that was highlighted on the calendar when you opened Ready Check.
Then, use the check boxes to select the various criteria you want to look at. Let’s look at each in turn.
The first two options are helpful if you are looking to control hour or day timing. Your format clocks will predict the length of your hours based on average runtimes, but when songs are actually scheduled, you may find your hours are over or under time.
This can add up over time and cause time creep, so that things you’ve programmed to happen at certain times of day (like a top of hour news bulletin) may be off the mark. Of course, your automation system may be set up to correct for this by dropping or squeezing songs as needed. However, some users would prefer to take control in MusicMaster first, so they have a better idea of what’s happening with their log before it goes to air. That’s where Hour Timing comes in.
This can be done by adding a Time Marker element to the end of your format clock and specifying that you’d like it to fall within some window of time. In this example, I’m telling MusicMaster to try and keep this marker within 58:30 to 61:30, or a 90 second window on either side of the 60-minute mark. This gives me some wiggle room that I’m okay with.
Next, to make sure this actually happens, I need to apply the Clock Hour Timing rule. This is found in the Format Clock Rules folder. I’ll add it as an Unbreakable Rule in my All Categories folder and then Save changes to my rule tree.
Now, when MusicMaster is scheduling, it will lean towards songs that help satisfy the length of my hour, picking shorter or longer songs if needed. If the hour ends up too short, I’ll see rule violations as a warning. If the hour time is met or exceeded, MusicMaster may leave some remaining positions unscheduled.
Furthermore, when I’m editing the log, I’ll see a rule violation if I try to swap in a song that throws my hour timing off. If I filter the Replacement Songs (F9) window to display only perfect songs, or songs that don’t violate my Unbreakable Rules, I can be assured that all the choices will fit in time.
Just as with any other rule, some users might prefer to have very strict hour timing settings, while others may allow a little more wiggle room so that the natural rotation of their songs aren’t inadvertently skewed, with some songs being favored or overlooked. You can keep an eye on your spins using History Analysis and adjust as needed.
Looking back at Ready Check, I can use the first two options to make sure my hour timing is happening as expected.
I’ve set my first check to make sure that my hours are between -1:30 and +1:30 of an exact hour.
Since some hours may be more accurate than others, I want to make sure the whole day is coming out okay by using the second option. Here, I’ve asked MusicMaster to check whether each day is coming within 15 minutes under or over the 24-hour mark. You can select any values which are acceptable to you.
Moving on, the third option will warn me if there are any Unscheduled elements left in the log I might have missed. I have the option to “Ignore if the hour time is satisfied”. As mentioned above, you might expect MusicMaster to leave some elements unscheduled if you’ve already met your hour time. If you haven’t already deleted them from the log, you can tell Ready Check to ignore them.
The fourth option checks for missing audio files, or files that are not found in the path you specified in your Audio Filename field. You also have the option to ignore Non-Music, since you might not be concerned if a piece of imaging is missing and doesn’t play.
The fifth option checks for Loose Spots. This has to do with your Traffic Merge. When you run Traffic Merge, it will insert spots into the buckets of time you’ve specified as Traffic elements in your clock. Generally, this should happen as expected, because you’ve coordinated with your traffic software and accounted for appropriate start and end times in MusicMaster.
However, if a mistake happens and MusicMaster can’t fit a spot into the available buckets of time, that spot will be unscheduled and considered “loose”. MusicMaster keeps track of these loose spots, and when you run Ready Check, it will tell you if a spot from your Traffic Merge did not actually appear in your scheduled log.
Finally, Ready Check is used to ensure your Airplay Contracts are being met. Airplay Contracts are used if you need to control when and how often a certain song or promo should play. For example, maybe during the month leading up to the 4th of July, you need a certain concert promo to air at least three times every weekday within 5pm-10pm. That’s a lot to keep track of!
Fortunately, you can double check yourself by setting up Airplay Contracts.
In the library, right click on a song and select Airplay Contracts from the context menu. If the item already has a contract, it will be listed here and you can Edit it. You can also create one by selecting New.
In the settings, you can set the contract Start and End Date, or when this contract will be in effect.
Next, you’ll set the Daily Requirements, like the minimum plays you need in a certain time-period. You also have the option to select days of the week where you want this contract to be applied. What you’re essentially saying is that you want to be sure the Daily Requirements are met within this hour window and these days, and outside of them, you don’t really care what happens. Here’s my example for the Fourth of July promo described earlier.
It’s important to point out that Airplay Contracts are not a rule. They don’t actually force the song to play when and how you’ve specified. You’ll have to set that up yourself using your clocks and dayparting. Likewise, a song will not stop airing just because the Airplay Contract period ended. Instead, you’ll need to remove the song from active rotation yourself, or use an automated tool like AutoMove to transfer it to a holding category on a certain date.
Instead, Airplay Contracts work hand-in-hand with Ready Check to warn you if you haven’t met the criteria you intended to during that contract period. If so, you’ll see a warning in Ready Check that you’ve violated your Airplay Contract, with details on what was overlooked.
Now that I’ve checked all the criteria I want to test in Ready Check, I hit Begin to start the process. In a moment, the results appear in the right-side panel.
The results show that despite the best efforts of Hour Timing, there were two hours that were under timing and one that was over. However, my day is still timing out within 15 minutes of 24 hours, so no problems there.
I also accidentally left two positions unscheduled in the 6pm hour, have one audio file that’s missing, and neglected to play one of the two required Fourth of July promos during the specified time slot.
Armed with this information, I can make any changes I need to satisfy my standards. But just as with many things in MusicMaster, this will be up to my individual preferences and needs.
Contact your Music Scheduling Consultant if you have any questions.
Assignment Grid Patterns geposted von Jesus Rodriguez am Juni 27th, 2022
Assignment Grid Patterns
By Jesus Rodriguez
I often get calls from clients who want to get creative with their clock assignment grids, whether for competitive purposes or having different clocks with different categories every hour. The challenge at times before MusicMaster PRO Version 8 was implementing the clocks in the grid quickly when not positioned in hours next to each other. You may recall in our previous versions that you can still drag your mouse across the grid to select multiple hours and then type the clock code to see those hours assigned with the clock. What if you wanted to do the same quick task, but your clock needs to be across the grid in multiple hours that are not next to each other?
We have some great new shortcuts built right into the Assignment Grid. Let’s start with the first fantastic solution to select multiple hours anywhere on the clock. Press down on your Control button on your keyboard, then use your mouse to click on any hour square, even rows, and columns.
We also added a new tab in the assignment grid to help you quickly select any pattern you prefer based on your broadcast week, specified hours, shifts, match current hour, and the ability to invert your current selection.
With the Select Days option, you can select the hours of the week based on odd days, even days, and even both possibilities with and without the weekends included.
We can even make patterns based on hours. You can quickly select all your odd and even hours.
As they say, AND THERE’S MORE!!! We get crazy and quickly select your odd and even hours in a diagonal pattern.
Next, select your format clock to implement it into any of your desired patterns.
One common thing I see by many of our users is clocks specific to a daypart shift. You may have particular clocks for mornings, afternoons, nights, etc. Now you can implement them right away by selecting the shift pattern option.
You can also select a group of hours and apply any patterns only to that selection.
Did you decide to create a new clock to replace another used randomly throughout the week? Did you know that as of version 8, you can now select that clock no matter which hour it is on the grid and replace it in a couple of clicks with your new clock? Now you can! Simply select Match Current Hour from the pattern options.
This option will select all the same clocks on your grid to then select and replace them with your new clock.
This option will replace your old clock on the grid with another.
Whether you are the type of scheduler that enjoys different clocks every hour, you do not have the same clock at the same hour every day, or you are super competitive to prevent anyone across the street from figuring you out, this new feature will be a significant time-saver and workflow enhancement.
We hope you enjoy this new addition to MusicMaster PRO Version 8.0!
Contact your Music Scheduling Consultant with any questions.
Auto Platoon for Classical Stations geposted von W.I.Z.A.R.D. am Juni 13th, 2022
Auto Platoon for Classical Stations
By The W.I.Z.A.R.D.
If you were tempted to stop reading just because the title of this article mentioned “classical”, I encourage you to read on. Even though the examples are tailored to that format, any format can take advantage of Auto Platoon to play rested music in their format.
With so much music to choose from, classical programmers have the dilemma of how to program all of it. Honestly, you really can’t, at least not well. The question is how to take advantage of all the amazing music in your library while still maintaining appropriate turnovers for your categories. One answer is Auto Platoon. Auto Platoon lets you move pieces in and out of rotation to keep the category fresh while maintaining your category size.
We’ll start with some basic premises:
You have categories that have a general size and clocks that call for these categories in a way that you have the category turning over in a time frame you want. What that time frame is, is not important. Whether the category turns over in 30 days or 90 days, is up to you. The point is that the turnover is what you want.
There is far more music you could be playing but to do so would slow the rotation of your categories down too much.
With these things in mind, here are two different examples of how you might use Auto Platoon to take advantage of all that music.
You have all this music in your Hold categories that you do not play regularly. When you review the Hold categories, there are pieces there you’d like to play but prefer not to sacrifice the turnover of your active categories.
Create a new category for this music. When you open Schedule, Auto- Platoon, pick the original category and then this new category. Set the Move By to Category Plays so you know the piece will play in the category that many times before being available to move. We’ll skip Filters in this example. The Schedule can be what you’d like. There are many choices available. Finally pick the number of pieces you want to move. You might pick 10 pieces.
The result is that 10 pieces are moved out of the category and 10 moved in. The number of total pieces remains the same so you retain the turnover of the category. The specific pieces change a little at a time. That means you are giving pieces a little rest and playing something else.
Click on the Analyze button to get details. The information about how long it will take a piece to go out and come back is important to understanding how long the piece will rest.
Keep making adjustments to the Schedule or number of pieces until you get the amount of desired rest.
One of my favorite examples of this is to use the Filter option in Auto Platoon.
Vivaldi wrote about 500 concertos. Does every one need to be in active rotation? For the sake of argument, let’s say you have recordings of 100 of these concertos. At any given time, you could have 10 in active rotation and 90 resting. Using the Auto Platoon Filter option, you can specify that you want to move pieces that match the criteria of Composer equals Vivaldi and Title contains Concerto. You might move one or two a week. You’ll continue to have the same saturation of Vivaldi concertos in your active library, 10, but at any given time, the specific 10 will change. That means your core will understand you are playing more of his canon while your likers will simply enjoy another Vivaldi Concerto. Win. Win.
You might do this for several composers to continually refresh which specific titles are playing.
Once you have your Auto Platoon settings in place, the action will be performed when you automatically schedule your log.
One more caution: If you add or subtract music from either Auto Platoon category, revisit the settings to make sure they are still working as you’d like.
If you program a format other than classical, you now know why I wanted you to read on. You also have music in your library that just missed the tested cut or maybe you have older work that still fits the format. You can use Auto Platoon to move these songs in and out of rotation the same way to give you audience the “Oh, wow, I haven’t heard that song in a long time” experience.
Should you need any assistance in setting this up, contact your MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant.
MusicMaster 8.0.5 Now Available geposted von Scott Wirt am Juni 1st, 2022
MusicMaster 8.0.5 is now available in Help, Check for Updates.
With this release the internal web browser has been updated from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Edge. Previously you might have encountered websites that no longer worked with Internet Explorer. With Microsoft Edge, the latest publishing standards are met making pages display better. There are added benefits including improved rendering performance, the ability to save user credentials for the Music Store (better cookie handling) and the ability to redirect the default download folder for Store audio file downloads.
We’ve updated the Chart Editor to better handle songs that re-enter the chart. Previously if a song was removed then added again, fields were cleared. Now as long as the Peak Position is more than zero, the song will be treated as re-entering the chart. This means fields like Debut Date and various Peak fields will not change unless the re-entry is higher than the current values.
Due to the possible installation of Microsoft Edge, the installation file will check to see if your system needs this installed. If it does, an additional messaging screen will appear to indicate this. Please note that if this needs to be installed, the process will take significantly longer than you might be used to. Once this is installed, subsequent installations will be back to a normal length.
Recombinant Scheduling geposted von Laurie Knapp am Mai 30th, 2022
Recombinant Scheduling for Priority Categories
By Laurie Knapp
With every major version release, we aim to introduce an innovative Scheduling method that works under the hood to give better results. In Version 8, there is a new mode called Recombinant Scheduling. It appears as an option in the Search Depth window (Schedule Properties).
This is a special function that was designed for fast rotation priority categories (search depth of 1) and for stations that struggle to separate multiple songs by the same contributing artists that are in high rotation.
This situation creates difficulties in passing artist separation rules because the songs in your priority categories can only play in the schedule order defined for their category. By the nature of how songs and categories rotate at different speeds against each other, sometimes you end up with artist conflicts and rule violations or Unscheduled Positions that you have to fill and juggle manually.
Recombinant Scheduling allows MusicMaster to juggle these songs around for you within the positions available for that category in the same hour to find the best combination that violates the fewest rules. This not only saves you time trying to make those changes manually, but is more likely to find the least rule violating pattern.
It’s important to note that while the Scheduler is of course looking backwards across hours to find artist conflicts, the shuffling itself only happens within the hour. That way, Hour Rotation for those songs are not impacted, as they will still play within the intended hour, just in a different position or quarter hour.
To use Recombinant Scheduling mode on a category, go to Dataset > Schedule > Schedule Properties and select it as an option from the Search Depth drop down. Note that if you want to use Recombinant Scheduling in some dayparts and not others, you can use the Levels feature. This allows you to assign a certain selection of search depth settings to a specific daypart, stored as a Level.
Recombinant Scheduling and Rules
Your rule settings are up to you, and either Breakable or Unbreakable rules will still work in conjunction with Recombinant Scheduling. As always, you can adjust your rule settings until you get the results you desire and use MusicMaster’s various analysis tools to look at the recommended separation values for each category.
Your choices also depend on what you’re looking to accomplish. Previously, you may have excluded your priority categories from any kind of rules because you wanted to play those songs in order and let everything else schedule around them.
When you have multiple priority categories, or artists appearing on multiple records within your priority categories, you may need to have rules to keep those artists from playing too closely together. Depending on your preferences, you can choose to use either Unbreakable or Breakable rules.
If you use Unbreakable rules, Recombinant Scheduling will do its best to shuffle the songs around within the hour so there are no artist conflicts that violate the rules. But if this is impossible given your separation settings, it will relax the Unbreakable rules just enough to make something work. This is how you might act when manually editing the log. If you find your rule settings are too restrictive, you might also consider relaxing them.
If you use Breakable rules, Recombinant Scheduling will also do its best to shuffle songs around the hour in such a way that all your breakable rules are met. As you’d expect, though, it will break the rules if it must. The good news is, because of Recombinant Scheduling’s unique shuffling ability, the Scheduler will have more options to pass your breakable rules and you’ll end up with far less rule violations than had you just plotted all your songs in schedule order.
Example Use
Let’s walk through an example of how Recombinant Scheduling helps schedule two priority categories with overlapping artists (Categories A and B). Here are the rule settings I chose:
I’ve chosen to set Unbreakable rules on both those categories. I want my primary artists to be separated by 35 minutes. However, it’s less important to me that there be a large separation between contributing artists. To avoid them playing back-to-back, I’ve just added a 6-minute separation to the All Keywords field, which contains all my primary and contributing artists.
You can see the result of Recombinant Scheduling in the following log. Here, the original schedule order is marked for illustration purposes using the numbers in the Q column, as well as within the song title.
(To create your own schedule order field like this, you can add a text field in Dataset > Library > Fields. Then sort your category by schedule order by right-clicking on the upper left corner of the grid, or referencing Schedule > Schedule Order. You can then fill in numbers in order from top to bottom.)
Categories H and C are priority categories that only play once an hour, so I didn’t need to use Recombinant Scheduling with them. Instead, they were scheduled in order during the first Scheduling Pass. I then scheduled A and B around them using the Recombinant Scheduling mode.
In the image below, you can see that the blue highlighted songs by DJ Khaled would have been in conflict if they’d scheduled in order at 1:44am and 2:11am (less than 35 min apart). So, MusicMaster instead swapped the third song in the stack (“MASK OFF”) up to that second position at 2:11am, and saved Song 2 (“Shining”) for the next position where it had no conflict.
For another example, we can see how Recombinant Scheduling improved the separation between my secondary artists.
As you can see, the changes need not be dramatic. For the most part, MusicMaster will schedule your songs in their original order, and only make the swaps necessary to resolve conflicts so you don’t have to worry about them.
If you’re scheduling a current or tight rotating format, we encourage you to give Recombinant Scheduling a try. You may also want to try out different rule settings and check out the results to see what works best for you.
If you have any questions, talk to your MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant.
Database Security and User Rights geposted von Brian Wheeler am Mai 16th, 2022
Database Security and User Rights
By Brian Wheeler
Your MusicMaster database is your station’s ‘secret sauce’. It’s what makes your radio station(s) unique. It makes sense to protect the secret sauce from prying eyes, right? Setting up security for your database is an easy process.
To set up your security system, go to Tools, Options. Under Dataset Security, you’ll see Users and Rights. We’ll start there.
Here is where you establish usernames, passwords, and permissions. You can enable and disable certain functions for users so they are not burdened with areas of the program that are not within their individual roles. Select “Create User” to proceed with creating a username and password for your auxiliary users.
Once you’ve created a new user, you can assign a username and password. From that point, you can give them access to as much or as little of the software as you wish by checking the areas to which they require access.
Finally, when all users have been created and assigned, you can enable the security here.
Select the Enable Security button and your security system is ready to go. The next time you open MusicMaster, a username and password will be required to access the database.
The benefits to securing your database should be obvious, but there are additional benefits of which you may not be aware. Did you know that if you’ve enabled our security feature, you can also determine who has made changes in the schedule editor? It’s true!
Open the Schedule Editor and select the Modify Editor Layout icon. In the screen that appears, find the list of fields in the left side of the screen and look for Schedule: Last Change and Schedule: Changed By. Bring these two fields into the Selected Fields list in the middle of the screen by dragging and dropping them or using the single arrow icon pointing to the right. Drag and drop these fields to position them in the layout in the order you desire. Hit OK and choose the Save Editor Layout icon to save the layout.
Now, when a song is changed in the log or an unscheduled position is filled two pieces of information will display in these fields. Schedule: Last Changed will display the date and time of the change and Schedule: Changed By will record the profile used when the change was made.
If you have any questions about setting up Database Security, reach out to your Music Scheduling Consultant and we’ll be happy to help.
Support Bulletin: ESET Internet Security and MusicMaster geposted von Jerry Parker am Mai 4th, 2022
It has come to our attention that the most recent release of ESET Internet Security (Version 15.1.12.0) can inadvertently cause MusicMaster Pro to terminate during the license check. This will result in an abrupt software failure.
If you have recently upgraded your ESET product and are having this problem, please contact your MusicMaster support rep for assistance. We are working with ESET to find a permanent solution to this incompatibility and will update this notice as new information becomes available.
Update: It appears that once the ESET protection is updated to May 10, 2022 or later, this problem no longer occurs.
Audio Editor geposted von Dave Tyler am Mai 2nd, 2022
Pro 8 Audio Editor
By Dave Tyler
You have asked for it. Heck I have asked for it and it is finally here in MusicMaster Pro Version 8: The Audio File Editor! If you already have your song cards in MusicMaster linked to your audio files then you are ready to go. If not then check out this article on how to set that up: https://musicmaster.com/?p=3486.
The Audio Editor allows you to accomplish some basic but important functions for your audio including Normalizing audio, trimming silence and even setting the runtime for playback in MusicMaster. As long as you do not already have an external audio editor set up, you will see the new Audio File Editor by default with SHIFT-F12.
Let’s look at of the available options. To get started open a category and right click on the song and choose Audio/Edit Audio File or SHIFT-F12.
Now let’s start by trimming the silence. This is a great feature because it allows you trim silence based on a “Silence Threshold” of your choosing from the front of the audio, end of the audio or both sides. Simply click the Trim Silence button, adjust your settings and click OK!
You may have noticed if you scoped an hour of music or just let an hour play in MusicMaster that sometimes a song will end and there will be a long perceived silence before the next song plays. This could be because there is a lot of extra silence at the end of the sound or maybe, like The Beatles, “A Day In The Life” the song has a very long fade. With Auto Runtime, based on your settings for “Silence Threshold”, you can have MusicMaster automatically determine where the song should segue into the next element. When you save this, it also updates the runtime on the MusicMaster song card automatically.
And finally, “Normalize” I love this. As you know the recording industry has changed and every file is compressed pretty heavily nowadays. If your library includes songs from multiple decades then you might find a vast difference between the levels of a 70’s tune and a 2010 song. Normalizing your audio will help get these closer together to each for a consistent listening experience. While in the past this might have been difficult, MusicMaster makes i SO easy to do. Click Normalize, adjust your settings and click OK. We’ve even included a DC Offset Removal feature that will help center your audio if it is found to be off at all.
One more important note: Since you are editing the actual file used on the air, a new Permission has been added to Tools, Options, Database Security. The Tools, Audio Editor permission will allow you to give or remove access to this feature. Remember you will also need to Enable Security on the Dataset Security option to complete this process.
MusicMaster Pro version 8 is available now and a leap for Music Schedulers. This is just one new feature that can be found in this groundbreaking version of the World’s #1 Music Scheduling software.
Phantom Burn and Familiarity geposted von Joseph Knapp am April 28th, 2022
Phantom Burn and Familiarity
By Joseph Knapp, Founder, MusicMaster Inc.
Shortly after streaming music services made it possible for radio listeners to hear their favorite songs on demand, the landscape of radio changed dramatically. Now your audience can hear any song at any time, create their own playlists and share their playlists with their friends. Most of these services now suggest similar music, leading people to discover new music they’ve never heard before and often music that your station is not playing.
Once upon a time, listeners had far fewer opportunities to discover new music. The biggest influence was radio. Top 40 radio introduced new songs to the audience. Tight rotations made your audience familiar with the new songs. It didn’t take long for them to decide if they liked a new song. After a certain number of spins, the audience would grow tired of hearing the song.
Before music research became popular, it was nearly impossible to determine if a new song was widely liked, or disliked, by your target audience. It was also difficult to determine when a new song had been played often enough for your target audience to grow tired of hearing it. Research made it possible to dump the ‘stiffs’ quickly and move the hits to a slower rotation category at just the right time.
Now that radio no longer controls new music discovery and the exposure of hit music to the audience, music research has become even more important. New songs added to your rotation can burn a lot faster than before, due to additional listening opportunities from outside sources. You may also be missing out on new music that is quickly becoming a favorite of your listeners.
Watching what other stations are doing using media monitoring services can give you some guidance, but it can also lead you to false assumptions. Your market and your audience may have different musical tastes and repeat airplay tolerances. If being local is important to you, your music rotation choices should also be based on local trends.
Is it possible that many formerly local radio stations failed to maintain the audience revenue necessary to support the local programming talent and entertainers necessary to remain profitable and compromised playing a national satellite or syndicated provider instead? Perhaps the cure was worse than the disease for these stations. Bottom line revenue cuts are rarely as profitable as top line revenue gains.
I offer these observations simply as food for thought, but I’m always happy to ‘talk radio’ with anyone!
F9 and Finding an Old Favorite geposted von W.I.Z.A.R.D. am April 18th, 2022
F9 and Finding an Old Favorite
By The W.I.Z.A.R.D.
Cooking has undergone a renaissance where adding spices from different cultures or just in different combinations can make all the difference. Perhaps you’ve done some experimenting in the kitchen where you try a new twist on your favorite dishes.
Would you ever consider doing something like that with your MusicMaster data? Would you like to add a little spice to your playlists? Let’s see if you’re ready.
Does this describe you:
You press F9, look through the same list of songs when you have to fill an unscheduled position or just need to do something different. You regret to admit you’re a little bored picking the same songs all the time.
You have lots of music in your library that you don’t play on a regular basis, the proverbial Hold category or category with the songs that came in after the cutoff of your music test.
If either of these fits you, here’s a simple thing you can do to change things up. Go to Tools, Options, Schedule Editor Options and open Replacement Song Options.
The Search Mode will default to F9. The Default Category List will default to Use category of currently scheduled song or element. Change that to Specific Category List. Now pick those categories that have songs that could play and still meet all your programming goals. Okay and close the screen.
In the Editor, where F9 previously would have given you the songs from the original category, now you’ll get the new list you selected. What this ultimately means is that every time you have to fill a position or you want to make a change, you’ll be picking songs that don’t routinely schedule. These songs still fit your format and programming goals. You’ve just given your audience an “oh wow” moment. That’s a win no matter how you look at it.
Should you want the original category, you can always use the binocular icon to change the category list. This change simply brings these perhaps forgotten songs back to your attention to get a little love.
One more thing: When you open Replacement Song Options, there is a drop down there. You’ll find other replacement options listed where you can also configure the settings.
There is so much music that works in your format that doesn’t get regularly played. This is just one way to make it easier to add that spice into your playlist. Cook up a playlist that has your audience craving more.
Should you have any questions or need assistance setting this up, reach out to your Music Scheduling Consultant.