MusicMaster Blog

By Marianne Burkett

Some days, a client call about one thing and then, it turns into a fact finding mission about a completely different issue.  Let’s take the call I received this morning from PD Bob.  Initially, he’d called about changing one hour in his assignment grid for just one day.  We went through the steps in changing the grid, unscheduling that hour to reset the clock template, and rescheduling the one hour.  I was thinking …okay, that was a quick call.

Then, he asked how to disable Gold Recycling in a few of his older categories.   We discussed it and I walked him through the procedure.  (Dataset/Schedule/Gold Recycle/X) Bob also does morning drive, so he is frequently listening to the midday music and then listening to the overnight show the next day, where he’d hear recycled music.  We started talking about repetition and listening patterns of the audience.

Then, he said something was bothering him about repetition of a specific song and asked about searching by automation number.  I pointed him in the right direction using a Library Query, and searched for a specific number.  He looked at the history of the song and said he felt like he was going crazy because he thought he heard the song two times within a few hours two or three days earlier.  So, I used the MusicMaster “Search Bar”… (it looks like a windows address bar) and searched by the title.  That is when we discovered the same title with two distinct automation numbers in active rotation! Since he was brand new to MusicMaster Windows, I suggested we look for more duplicates.

Using the Song List Editor, (which you can access via the Info Bar or Dataset/Library/Song List Editor)…

…we did a library search of his rotated music…

…and then, using the middle double arrows…

…added ALL songs to the Song List Contents area on the left.  (The double arrow to the right, with 1<< adds only unique songs.)

On the left side I showed him the “Wizard Wand” icon and Song List Arrangement function “Find Duplicate Songs”.

Once you click OK, the duplicates rise to the top.

As you can see, he found four duplicate titles with different automation numbers.

So, I had him mark the newer (second song) duplicate with his F7 key, and exit the Song List editor.

Now all he needed to do was move the marked songs to a hold category and scan his editor for the marked duplicate songs that were already scheduled, and replace them with something else.

Now, is it possible that PD Bob may want to turn his Gold Recycling back on?  I’m not sure, but he won’t be having the duplicate issue anymore.

Our thanks to PD Bob for allowing us to show his data to illustrate this issue.

If you have any concerns or questions about your library and troubleshooting, contact your Music Scheduling Consultant for some quick answers!