MusicMaster Blog
The Art of Special Sets (Part Four) posted on October 27th, 2014
By Paul Ziino
We’ve learned a lot so far: how to schedule a special set to make a two-fer in part one, how to create and use kickoff categories for those two-fers in part two, and how to use special sets to auto-schedule artist and title IDs in part three. In this, the final chapter of the series, we’ll discuss how to schedule special sets based on other special set positions.
At this point you are automatically scheduling custom intros ahead of songs. Now we’re going to auto-schedule name drops based on those custom intros. Here’s how.
We have a donut type of imager that has an intro and an outro and we want to play it at the start of a 20 minute sweep of music. “Coming up in the next 20 minutes…” is the first part of the donut, followed by the hole for your artist name drops, then the end of the donut “…on Mix 101.” By using the different special set passes we can tell MusicMaster to schedule a name drop based on future positions in the log. In our sample below, the item in Pos 6 is based on the Next Special Set-Same Pass’s Intro ID Keyword-Pass 2. That base or “target” is in Pos 12. The item in Pos 7 is based on the Next Special Set-Same Pass’s Intro ID Keyword-Pass 3 which is in Pos 17. And the item in Pos 8 is based on the Next Song (Music)’s Intro ID Keyword which is scheduled in Pos 10.
There is a catch here, since we cannot schedule special sets based on items that are not yet scheduled, you’ll need to run the auto-scheduler twice. The first time will plot all the music and the second time will plot all the special sets that are based on other special sets.
Here’s what it ends up looking like in the Schedule Editor.
You’ll see we start the hour with a double-shot of Ellie Goulding based on that Kickoff position. Then we have our “Coming up…” imaging with the name drops for Bruno Mars, Train, and Taylor Swift which are all coming up within the next 20 minutes.
As always, if you have questions on the Art of Special Sets or any other MusicMaster-related topic, your MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant is just a phone call or email away. We’d like to send a special thank you to Kid Kelly from Sirius XM Hits 1 for his assistance with this article!