MusicMaster Blog

by Paul Ziino

So you ran the Automatic Scheduler in your data and when you review and edit the log, you see MusicMaster left a few positions unscheduled. Now the question is, why? Ultimately, the answer is because no song in the available depth passed all the unbreakable rules, thus MusicMaster was unable to fill that position.

So now you go to that unscheduled position, double-click on it to open the list of replacements, and you see a number of options that pass the unbreakable rules. So now the question is, why didn't MusicMaster fill this position with one of these songs?

The answer, as indicated before, no song in the available depth passed all the unbreakable rules. What does this mean? It means that even though some songs in the category passed those unbreakable rules, those weren't the songs being tested at the time MusicMaster was auto-scheduling that position.

Your depths are set in Schedule Properties (Dataset/Schedule/Schedule Properties). The depth is the number of songs that MusicMaster can look at when searching for a song to schedule. If you have 100 songs/slots in the category, and the depth is set at 10, this means MusicMaster looks at the next 10 songs in the 'stack', and if none passes the unbreakable rules, the position is left unscheduled.

If you are consistently getting unscheduled positions in the log for a given category, but you see songs that pass the unbreakable rules when editing those positions, it's a good idea to try increasing the category's depth in Schedule Properties. So in that category of 100 with a depth of 10, had we increased that depth to 15, MusicMaster would have tested 5 more songs. So if song 12 in the stack passed the unbreakable rules it would have been auto-scheduled.

The idea here is to make sure your depths are deep enough to allow the program to find a song to auto-schedule, but not so deep that it's testing songs unnecessarily. A little trial and error will help you find the right depth for each category.