MusicMaster Blog

Level Up!

By Dave Tyler

As a Music Scheduling Consultant for MusicMaster and a 35+ year radio veteran, I have used just about all the scheduling software programs available over the years. I see time and time again how intuitive and powerful MusicMaster is. If you want to do it, if you can hear it in your head, MusicMaster can make it happen. There is so much horsepower under the hood and so many tools in the trunk it will blow your mind.

Recently I had a top-notch programmer, who is very detailed oriented and knows everything about his database, contact me with any interesting question. He was running a “Quiet Storm” type program on Saturday nights and in keeping with that style it was all slow songs. His issue was that he knew he had to increase his search depth but when he did that he did not like how it affected his regular week rotations and asked if there was a solution.

It was my pleasure to say “YES!!!”. During the week he wanted his A category to only dig 1 deep and other categories no more than 50% however on Saturday nights he needed to dig deeper because he had clock filters in place calling for only Tempo 1 and 2 (Slow and Slow Medium) songs. Looking at his Schedule Properties window for his normal week (Dataset/Schedule/Schedule Properties) it looked similar to my example below:You can see in the top left corner that in “Level 1” his setting are consistent with what I mentioned above. This is the search depth settings for the entire week. Keep in mind though he wants these search depths to increase for one 5-hour period each week. To do this we need to level up! By pressing the little calendar icon to the left of where it says “Level 1” we will launch the “Show/Hide the Level Assignment Grid” and we see that it is all 1s across the week.

So let’s change the grid so Saturday night from 7p-Midnight now reflects a level setting of 2. Once we do that the drop down box displaying the level will also change to 2. We change our search depth settings to 100% and then click Save and we are done.

Now the client has accomplished the goal of increasing search depth during a certain time period automatically. This takes very little setup and is such a powerful tool!

For more information on how to do this or any other question you may have please contact your dedicated Music Scheduling Consultant. Our goal is for that great radio station you hear in your head to be coming out of the speakers of every radio in your market. Let’s make it happen!