MusicMaster Blog

By Marianne Burkett

Severe weather effects most regions in the country and most countries in the world from time to time.  Lightning, flooding, torrential rains, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes or ice storms!  There’s also just regular power outages, rolling brownouts, hard-drive meltdowns, untimely network disconnections etc.  Are you prepared to “cut and run” with your stations database, your dongle and a copy of the MusicMaster software application safely tucked away in the event of an emergency?  Do you have a backup copy of your database?

A Short, Mostly True Story:

The rain was relentless and the rivers were spilling over their banks.  Homes were being engulfed in water all through the city.  The radio station, seemingly impervious to other bad weather situations in the past, was locked up for the weekend. The staff headed home to save their properties and help those in trouble.  Then, the unthinkable happened.  The river crested on Sunday and completely flooded the radio station.  Every desk, every computer, every laptop, the studios – EVERYTHING destroyed in the blink of an eye.

On Monday I received a call from the Program Director.  He explained what had happened.  I asked the simple question: Do you have a backup with you?  He did not have a backup, it was at the station.   He did however have an old laptop at his home, with an old backup stored on it.  It was a very old backup… five years old!  I explained what type of things would need to be done in MusicMaster, including Library Synchronization and rebuilding Categories, Clocks and Coding and… I worked with him on the project.  The Program Director also re-named old export files to recent dates, so something was on the air until his work was completed on the database.  The station was re-built and life is back to normal in the River City.

I certainly don’t mean to alarm you, but I would suggest doing a “Standard” backup to your hard drive, or server on a daily basis, in addition to performing a “Custom” flash drive backup on a daily basis.  Along with backing up the database – save a copy of the MusicMaster software application on a flash drive.  This way, in the event of an emergency, you can run the software and restore your backup onto your home computer or laptop and still generate logs.

Performing backups:

Tools/Backup/Perform a Standard Backup.  The backup file will be created and be stored to whatever location your MusicMaster icon is pointed to.  To find that, right click on your MusicMaster icon, go to Properties and look at the path.  In the example below you’ll see my icon is pointed to N:\MMdata

Performing a Custom Backup

It’s as simple as performing a Standard Backup!  You’ll need to create the backup profile before you can perform the Custom Backup.  First, you’ll need to find out what letter your flash drive is.  Plug in your flash drive, go to “My Computer” or “Computer” and take a look at what drive letter is assigned to the flash drive.  In the example below, my flash drive letter happens to be “E”.  Then, go to Tools/Backup “Create.”

Under Additional Files, consider adding in any files you need for reconciliation or traffic processes (the .DEF files).  These will then be included in your backup for safekeeping.

Click OK and you’ll be all set to perform a Custom Backup every single day.

You can create multiple Custom backup profiles as well.

Another safety net is to email yourself a backup on a daily basis.   Cyber-space is a wonderful thing.

I’ve also discovered the joys of using a free service called Dropbox, to store my backup in “the cloud” (more information in this post).

You may think I’m a bit paranoid in doing all these backups every single day I do work in MusicMaster.  So what?  I’d rather be a bit paranoid and careful, than lose even one day of work to some kind of natural or unnatural disaster.

Another thing of not is that you can access all versions of the MusicMaster software application from our support center.

Of course, if you have any questions at all – feel free to contact your Music Scheduling Consultant.  We are always here to help.

By Paul Ziino

Once set up, Alternate Categories within MusicMaster can offer a lot of options to music programmers. The basic concept is that in some dayparts you want a song to rotate in one category, but in other dayparts it should rotate in a different category. However you want MusicMaster to count plays in both categories for that song’s play history. (more…)

By Marianne Burkett

This is quite simple to set up, so if you follow this step by step you’ll be done in no time!

Open your Rule Tree and go to the very first folder in Available Rule Types on the right hand side of the rule tree, called “Special Rule Tree Items”. Inside that folder you’ll see Rule Groups.

First drag two rule groups into either the Breakable or Unbreakable folder of the first category you’d like to work on. Identify one Rule Group as your weekday rule group and the second as your weekend rule group. Once you’ve created a Time restriction for each rule group…be sure to select from the drag down menu immediately below your Time Restriction window “Ignore plays outside this time period”.

See illustrations below:

Once you have these first two Rule Groups set up, don’t populate them yet! Copy and paste the empty rule groups into the other categories you’d like the “Ignore weekday or weekend rotation rules” to adhere to. Once you’ve done that, populate your rule groups with rotation rules that make sense for each category. In the close-up below you’ll see a Minimum Rest rule and Exclusive Day Offset rule that are “outside” the rule group and will be adhered to 24/7. Inside the rule groups you’ll see some “dayparted” or “time restricted” Rotation Rules.

Also, in the example below, the Sliding Day Offset rules are different since we’re dealing with a larger window for the weekday rule group and a small window for the weekend rule group.

Remember, each category rotates differently, so be sure to utilize the power of the MusicMaster Turnover analysis icon, which on the illustration above is the blue arrow icon next to the calendar icon. The turnover analysis will give you a good idea about what kind of rules you need, such as day offsets or play offsets. The day offsets test from day-to-day, and are often used with small categories where a song would play every day or several times a day. In the next illustration you’ll see The Recurrent category will play almost everyday:

Play Offset Windows are used on categories that turn over at a much slower pace, like the sample below:

For more information about how to set up Rule Groups and the correct rules for your library, contact your Music Scheduling Consultant!

Today, I’m going to share an inter-office secret. I’m going to tell you how we share files between one another. Now this is top secret information so don’t go telling everybody. It might get back to your competition and they might become productive of all of a sudden.

That’s right, we use Dropbox to share files with one another. In fact, I used it to deliver this article to the person who is in charge of posting the blogs we write. Now, THAT is some super secret MusicMaster information I’ll bet you didn’t know. Today, I’m going to show you how to use Dropbox with MusicMaster at the station to make your life easier (and maybe your consultant’s life easier as well.) (more…)

by Aaron Taylor

In this article, we thought it would be helpful to run you through some “under the hood” areas of MusicMaster for Windows that you may have never had the opportunity to see before, or perhaps had poked around in these corners and always thought, “hmm, I wonder what this does” and figured you’d either ask your MSC about these areas, or might read up on those areas someday. Someday is today! This article is meant as an overview to these areas. We’ll be looking to write more about these areas in the future in more detail. In the meantime, if you have any questions about these areas, just contact us and we’ll be happy to discuss the areas with you in more detail. (more…)

By Paul Ziino

Lots of MusicMaster customers use Segue Protection rules to make sure slow songs don’t segue into fast songs or to prevent female artists from playing back-to-back. But have you ever considered using Segue Protection to match the talk-over times to the appropriate song intros? This is the question we get:

“I have a song with a 12 second intro. I want to make sure that the imaging piece before it will go over the ramp of the song and meet the post. Is that possible?” (more…)

by Marianne Burkett

This article is about properly caring for your database.

Today we take a look at three different scenarios where clients run into trouble. (more…)

By Drew Bennett

Let’s say you have the rare opportunity to totally overhaul your database. You’ve been thinking about new clocks and rotations and you want to get started on bringing better rotations to your station.

When it comes to scheduling music, clocks are ‘where the magic happens.’ (more…)