MusicMaster Blog

By Marianne Burkett

Have you taken advantage of the “Find Matching Values” icon in library maintenance? For instance, if you have your cursor on a songs “Mood” field and the value is 5, click on the Find Matching Values icon and every Mood 5 song will come up on your screen. You can try it on other fields as well, like Automation number – Gender – Artist – Intro, etc… and a great way to quickly find what you’re looking for.

by Paul Ziino

Here's a quick tip for you… If you want to find unscheduled items in your Schedule Editor, hold the Ctrl button on your keyboard and click the "Jump to Next Failure" or "Jump to Previous Failure" icon in the editor. This takes you immediately to the next or previous unscheduled position. And if there are no more unscheduled positions, you'll receive an error indicating "no matching failures found".

By Drew Bennett

Your info bar is the place in the software where you can see your categories listed. It’s usually docked on the left side of your MusicMaster software. But did you know you can get to clocks and even music logs from within the info bar? Take a look at the bottom of the info bar and you will see three tabs; the green music note tab shows your categories, queries and song lists. The clock tab shows all the clocks in the data and the calendar tab shows recent music logs. You can double click on a clock or a music log to be taken straight there without having to use the menus or icons at the top of the software.

By Paul Ziino

Now that spring is officially here, it’s a good time to make plans for your “summertime songs”. You can load them into your database today, but not allow them to start scheduling until Summer arrives.

First, you’ll want to add the “Start Day/Hour” and “End Day/Hour” field to your library grid layout.

Then go to the “Start Day/Hour” field in your library grid, or “Starts” on the song card view. Double-click in that field and select the date and time you’d like that song to become eligible. If you don’t fill in a time, midnight will  be the default. You can use “End Day/Hour” or “Ends” field to effectively kill that song at the end of summer, too.

And there are no rules to turn on to make this happen–they’re built-in!

This comes in handy for those songs you only want to run June through August, or only in December, but keep them in the regular rotation categories all the time.

By Marianne Burkett

So, you’ve decided to do a daily Countdown or perhaps a larger scale “Top 100” Countdown this weekend. In MusicMaster – whether it’s top 5 or 500 songs – you can automatically generate that Song List with the History Browser!

Dataset/Analysis/History Browser. Select your frame of time and which Music Categories you’d like included in the countdown. Set up the Details tab with “Individual Songs”. Go down the list and pick your number and press okay.

Doing this will Open the Browser. Report in order of Rank & Spins. Save as List. This will create a new Song List.

After you’ve created your Song List, right click on the song list and open the song list editor to make whatever tweaks you’d like to the list, like Reversing the Order so the number 1 song is at the end of the countdown.

Then, in your clocks – you’ll be using Element Type “Saved List”. Plug the List directly into the clocks (be sure to begin with “First”). Typically you’d have 2 clocks: the start of the countdown clock and then the continuation clock, which would begin with Saved List “Next”.

Plug those clocks into the assignment grid and you are done. Run the Automatic Scheduler. The list lays down first without looking at rules and then the rest of your music and non-music will schedule around it.

Happy Scheduling!

By Paul Ziino

A Combo element allows you to select any number of your categories. When MusicMaster starts the auto-schedule process, it will attempt to fill that Combo position with a song from the first category selected in that position, based on the Schedule Properties. (more…)

By Drew Bennett

Back in the day, (I won’t say what day because it will seriously date me) I was in charge of scheduling the music at an AC station in Kansas City. It’s gone now but it was a great station and I enjoyed the people I got to work with. We really tried to make our station compelling and special programming was something we focused on to really try and stand out. (more…)

Twice a year we go through Daylight Savings time changes and at MusicMaster, it typically generates a lot of phone calls.  No worries, let MusicMaster handle it for you! (more…)

By Marianne Burkett

So, your VP, owner or General Manager has announced that you will soon be switching to a different Automation system. You may be excited or you may be anxious about the new system coming in. With the number of clients we have here at MusicMaster… we’ve seen many stations approach this in various ways. I feel confident that this blog can provide you with some insight and steps you can take to make the switch less complex and overwhelming. (more…)

By Paul Ziino

After a long day’s work of editing logs, adjusting rotations, building clocks, and analyzing your data, it’s always a good idea to make a backup. Here’s how… (more…)