MusicMaster Blog

by Jerry Butler

If you are like most programmers, you wear yourself out getting ready for the holiday. Sure, you may get some time off, but you burn the candle at both ends getting ready for that break. MusicMaster is here to help you get ready for your next holiday.

Many stations run specialty imaging for holidays or seasons. Do you currently go through and manually schedule or run through tons of liners changing start and end dates to make it happen? MusicMaster makes it easy to change those elements quickly. Here are the steps to set up imaging elements using session filters.

I recommend organizing your seasonal elements into two categories. First, have a category for generic imaging, and second, create another for specific seasonal or holiday imaging. This could include imaging for individual holidays like Labor Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, or seasonal themes like Summer or Winter. Utilize a keyword field such as “Theme,” with generic imaging labeled as “generic” and seasonal or holiday imaging specified with the season or holiday. Once these categories are set up, proceed to the next step.

Open your clock where you insert your seasonal imaging. Create a combo position in your clock, prioritizing generic liners first, followed by holiday or seasonal liners. Click on the properties tab and select the “Apply Session Filters 1” box. If you’re using session filters for other events, assign a different session filter for this purpose. Save your clock, and now your session filter is active for that position.

Next, activate the rule for the session filter. Navigate to your rule tree and select the appropriate session filter from the right. Drag it over to either the “All Categories Unbreakable” folder or place the rule in each of the individual categories’ unbreakable folders. If you’re bypassing these imaging categories in your “All Category” rules, place the session filter rule in the individual categories for it to be honored. Once the rules are in place, save your rules.

Now you’re ready to schedule. Open your automatic scheduler window, navigate to the filter tab, and ensure the appropriate session filter is selected from the dropdown menu. In this example, we’re using session filter 1. Since we’ve coded our seasonal liners within the “Theme” field, select “Theme” and choose the specific theme, like Memorial Day. Once set, you can run your automatic scheduler.

Anywhere you’ve set session filter 1, it will look for the Memorial Day theme to schedule. It skips the generic category because everything there is coded as generic under the “Theme” field. Then, it moves to the seasonal category, skipping any imaging that doesn’t match the Memorial Day theme. It’s that straightforward. Just code your imaging under the appropriate theme and use the corresponding filter when scheduling for that holiday or season.

To revert to your generic liners, you can either click “Clear All Filters” in the filter tab of the automatic scheduler or select “generic” to schedule only liners coded as generic. If you clear all filters, it essentially ignores the filter and schedules normally. As long as your generic category is scheduled before your holiday or seasonal category in your pass order, everything should run smoothly. You can verify this by checking the schedule order under “Dataset,” “Schedule,” and “Schedule Properties.”

These enhancements should help streamline the process of scheduling your seasonal or holiday imaging. Contact your MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant with any questions.

Happy Scheduling… and enjoy your next holiday.