MusicMaster Blog
Category Groups for Auto-Scheduling posted on April 24th, 2017
By Paul Ziino
I’ve been working with a new customer lately. The programmers at these stations like to schedule in passes. First pass they schedule all the currents, then edit and review. Second pass they schedule their recurrents, then edit and review. Third pass is the rest of their music, then edit and review. And their fourth pass is of all the non-music categories.
To make this easier, we built Category Groups. This is done via Dataset/Library/Categories, then click Groups and New. Name the group (Pass 1), check the categories to be included in that first pass and click OK. Create another new group (Pass 2), and so on. No need to create a category group for the non-music categories—that one is built-in.
Now when they launch the automatic scheduler, they can use the pull-down under “Categories to Schedule” to select which pass they wish to run, and only those categories will be listed and scheduled. They’ve found this to be a lot easier than checking and un-checking from within the list of categories there. By the way, they also check the box “Do not advance last schedule date/hour” so that each time they go to schedule the next pass, they needn’t reset the date/hours to be scheduled.
For more ideas or help, just reach out to your friendly MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant or check out our many blog articles and training videos.