MusicMaster Blog

By Marianne Burkett

If you’re the type of programmer that elects to hand schedule – especially your heavy currents, make use of the Shift F9 key in the editor. Rather than bringing up a song replacement screen, Shift F9 will select the first song in the category that passes the rules. If you have unbreakable rules it cannot pass – it will alert you. If you don’t have any rules in your category it will automatically bring up the most rested song! Happy Scheduling!

By Paul Ziino

Every so often we get calls from MusicMaster users indicating “…my BMI report was rejected because they said it’s blank.” In most of those cases, the user likely missed a very important step—filling out the report’s Options tab. (more…)

by Paul Ziino

A quick tip for you when copying clocks: make sure to highlight the clock you wish to make a copy of before clicking the copy button in Dataset/Clocks/Format Clocks. The checkboxes are used for mass Deletion, Printing, Exporting, and Changing.

By Paul Ziino

There is a ton of information available in Turnover Analysis (Dataset/Analysis/Analysis, or the blue spinning arrows icon in the tool bar)! You can see song and slot count, Short and Long Turnover, and more…just right-click in the upper half of the screen and check any of the items you wish to add to your view. Things like Suggested Minimum and Maximum Rest, Average Spins per Day or Week, and Hour Exposure to name a few. You can change which assignment grid is being analyzed, too.

In the lower half of the screen you can adjust slot counts to see predicted rotations with more or less slots in the category, you can access the auto-burn spreadsheet, view format clock category usage, and even more!

by Paul Ziino

If you are a new MusicMaster user starting out with a brand new database, I like to recommend a few simple rules to get things going. (more…)

Most of you are aware that you can daypart a song or promo in MusicMaster by using the dayparting field. However, were you aware you can also restrict which part of the hour a song card is permitted to play? Let’s create a new restriction today on a song you NEVER want to play in the first 15 minutes of the 5pm hour. Double click on the dayparting field, put an “X” in the 5pm hour – then look to the Pink Pie icon at the top of the Daypart Restriction box, and click on it twice. That gives you the quarter hour options. To restrict a song from opening the hour – just remove the X from the first quarter hour. Save and Apply. Of course, be sure the dayparting rule is in effect in your rule tree as well!

By Paul Ziino

Always creating the same query over and over for the same bunch of categories? You can create a Category Group instead!

Go to Dataset/Library/Categories, then click Groups. On the Category Groups screen click New and name this group–something like "Active Music" or "Current Rotation" or whatever you—like and click OK. Now check each category you want to include in this new Category Group and click OK. Back to the Category Groups screen click OK once again. Your new category Group will be listed in the Music tab of the info bar beneath Entire Library, Music Categories, and Non-Music Categories. You can also access this new Category Group when you are in any query box by using the dropdown where it says "Entire Library".

By Paul Ziino

In an attempt to de-clutter your schedule editor, you can hide any number of things from the view simply by clicking the "Show/Hide Elements" icon (2nd from right in schedule editor).

On the Elements tab you can un-check any element types you do not wish to view. Hide your Lognotes, Scheduled Non-Music Songs, Hour Markers, and more.

The Toolbars tab allows you to select and un-select the Hour Selection bar, Instant Analysis, Results Bar, and the Test Results panel.

And the Categories tab allows you to hide any specific categories. You're only concerned about your currents? Hide everything else. Just remember to turn things back on when needed.

All hidden items are indicated by a red line in the schedule editor, just to let you know that something is there, you're just not seeing it.

By Marianne Burkett

In MusicMaster clocks you’ve got some options when it comes to searching for a “Forced Position” song card. By default you can search by Song ID – but you can also add another field to search by. Search by Category or Automation number, Title, etc…. Check out your field map in Dataset/Library/Fields and find the number of the field you’d like to search by, then head over to Tools/Options/Additional Properties and put the number of the field in Forced Song Search. Then, when you select a forced element in the clocks – you’ll have 2 ways to search! Song ID and whichever field you chose.

by Paul Ziino

You can edit trivia in MusicMaster by going to Dataset/Library/Trivia, then using the dropdown box to edit Song Trivia, Artist Keyword Trivia, Title Keyword Trivia, and so on.

To add trivia to a song, go to the song in question and click the "View/Edit Song Trivia" icon (2nd from right, looks like an envelope and paper clip) in library maintenance. When trivia is present on a song, the icon is green. When a song has no trivia, the icon is beige.

That same icon is available in your keyword edit boxes for assigning Artist Keyword, Title Keyword, and other keyword trivia. It also turns green when trivia is present for the keyword in question.