MusicMaster Blog

Think like a MusicMaster Pro

By: Chris Malone

There’s no other scheduler that takes you deep into the scheduled log thinking process like MusicMaster. If you’re wondering why a position has been left unscheduled or why a certain song is often looked over in the schedule process, then the Thinking File is a great tool to see what’s going on under the hood.

To get to this file, you want to ensure that you are saving your thinking process to your data folder upon running your Automatic Scheduler. In order to activate this feature, in your Automatic Scheduler, you want to click the Options tab and place a check mark next to Save Thinking Process To Disk.

MusicMaster remembers this option and will produce this thinking output file every time you run your Automatic Scheduler. The file overwrites each time you schedule, so keep that in mind when reviewing this. After your usual scheduling process is complete, you can access the Thinking File of the last scheduled day, you can find this on the Schedule, Recap Report. There is a Thinking tab that will open the file. If you prefer, you can also go to Help, About MusicMaster, Data Folder and find the file that way. It will be named after your station with “_thinking” in the filename.

The Thinking File breaks everything down to a line by line, slot by slot for deep analysis. You’ll see why songs were either perfect for consideration or skipped from consideration based on your scheduling parameters and the rules you have setup. In this example, you’ll see the beginning of the schedule process that first thinks through your over-arching parameters like Clock Elements, Gold Recycling periods, then proceeds to think through your categories. You can follow along and see Auto Burn ‘tossed’ two songs out of consideration before it found the best available song for this position on the log which was “34+35” by Ariana Grande.

This is the type of deep analysis you can expect to see in your Thinking File. In another example, you can see exactly how a song was left unscheduled in the schedule editor because the other songs up for consideration violated the unbreakable Artist Keyword Time Separation rule, leaving MusicMaster with no other option for this position on the scheduled log.

The Thinking File is a core breakdown of every position on your most recently scheduled music log. Think of it as a breakdown of the scheduling process to its most literal form.

If you need help accessing or reading your Thinking File, please reach out to your MusicMaster Music Scheduling Consultant.