MusicMaster Blog

By Paul Ziino

Sometimes you just know what you want to play, but scrolling through the replacement song list seems like such a waste of time.  At MusicMaster we value your time, so we have many ways to speed up this process.  Using Direct Field Entry when you edit will let you drill down to either the specific song you want or at least make the list significantly shorter.  One quick note:  What we’re about to describe may look like you are changing the information on a song.  Don’t worry, the options we’re describing only assist in Schedule Editor searches and don’t impact the data on your song cards.  Now, let’s speed up your editing!

You want to replace the song scheduled with a specific song—let’s say “Jump”.  Click once in the Title field and type in JUMP and press Enter.  MusicMaster will schedule that specific song!

Instead of scheduling a specific song, you want all songs that start with “Jump”.  We could type in “JUMP..” and you’d get all the songs that start with Jump including “Jump”, “Jumping Jack Flash”, and “Jump Around”.

You can use the double dots as a wild card in front of a phrase to get “ends with”, after a phrase to get “begins with” or on both sides of a phrase to get “contains”.

LOVE.. would net “Love is a Battlefield”, “Love Shack”, and “Loverboy”.
..LOVE would net “You Can’t Hurry Love”, “The Power of Love”, and “Smell the Glove”.
..LOVE.. would net all those options plus “You Give Love a Bad Name” and “Beloved”.

This same technique can be used in the Artist field.

JOHN.. would net John Lennon, John Mellencamp, and John Mayer.
..JOHN would net Elton John and Dr. John.
..JOHN.. would net the previously listed artists plus Jack Johnson.

If you always want to use the “contains” option, we can even set up the program so you’d never have to type the double dots.  Go to Tools, Options, Additional Properties and the Schedule section.  Go to the “Default Contains” option and set it to “1”.  Now, you can just type “John” in the Artist field and get all the artists listed above.

This feature isn’t limited to just Artist and Title.  Direct field entry can be used in a number of different fields in a similar fashion.

You can use direct field entry in the RunTime field to get a song that is exactly the length you want—just type in the desired runtime in MM:SS format, press [Enter], and the resulting list will be songs in your data that match that length.   RunTime is always in “equals” mode, the wild cards won’t do anything in this field.

Add your coding fields into your Schedule Editor design and use direct field entry to find songs that contain a specific code.  The wild cards don’t apply to coding fields, they default to a “contains” mode.  So if you type a D into the Sound field and press [Enter], it will show all songs that contain the D sound code.  If you type a 3 and [Enter] in the Tempo field, it will show all songs that have a 3 anywhere in that field.

Direct field entry can also be used as a quick way to change the category you want scheduled in a specific position.  Just type the desired category code in the Category field within the Schedule Editor, press [Enter], and that category’s list of replacement songs will come up.  The wild cards don’t work in Category either—it’s always in “equals” mode—so typing A and [Enter] will get songs in the A category.

By the way, direct field entry works on unscheduled positions just as well as it does on already-scheduled positions that you wish to change.

Direct field entry can really help to speed up the editing process.  Should you have questions on this or any other topic, reach out to your Music Scheduling Consultant or e-mail support@musicmaster.com for assistance.