MusicMaster Blog

by Drew Bennett

Let’s cheat! Let’s look at the answers! Let’s pass the test with flying colors! If you prefer to use your keyboard to operate certain features of the software, you can print out a cheat sheet to use until you become familiar with the various shortcut keys you’ll use to schedule music and maintain your library. From the Help menu at the top of the software, choose Index. When the Help section pops up and displays the Index, search for Shortcut Keys in the Index search field. MusicMaster will display a list of shortcut keys in the screen on the right. You can print this out and use it for reference until you know them by heart.

By Paul Ziino

I had a customer call recently because he couldn't find his toolbar. He went to View, and noted that Toolbar is checked. But he can't find it anywhere. So what did we do? Click Window – Find Floating Windows…and that brought his toolbar to the center of his screen.

What happens if the menu of File/View/Dataset/Tools/Window/Help is missing–how do you Find Floating Windows then? Press Alt-W, then F. Then your floating windows will appear in the center of your screen.

Perhaps you’ve added new music or non music categories to your library, or there are categories listed in your InfoBar panel you’d like to place in a different order.

Here are two different ways to get to the place that will allow you to do this.

You can right mouse click over the InfoBar list itself and select “Category Editor” from the list that comes up, OR from the menu at the top DATASET-LIBRARY-CATEGORIES.

In either case, left mouse drag the grey square in the left hand corner that corresponds to the category you want to move and simply drag that grey square straight up or down the list. When you have it where you want it, un click the mouse button, repeat as needed for additional categories.

Click OK in the lower right hand corner of the box, or you’ll get a confirmation box at the end of this process asking you if you want to save your changes.

Keep in mind, this has nothing to do with your category scheduling order (access that at Dataset-Schedule-Schedule Properties, OR right mouse clicking on the InfoBar and selecting Scheduling Properties)…

By Drew Bennett

Have you ever taken a new job at a radio station and walked in to find the data is a complete mess? I akin it to an apartment or house that other people have lived in before you…but they never totally moved out and now you’re faced with the uphill battle of making it your own and cleaning up!

One thing that can seem daunting is music cleanup. The idea of changing 2000 songs to show all upper case letters seems like a nightmare if you tackle it by hand. And if that’s the only way you can do it, I would bet you’d say to yourself, “…not worth it.” Well, in MusicMaster, that is a lot easier and this week, I want to make you aware of the Mass Changer in MusicMaster because it can save you more time than you might imagine. First things first; how do you get to the Mass Changer in MusicMaster for Windows? Well, when you look at the library you should see all of the fields for a song that you currently have in your layout. If you right click at the top of the field right on the field name itself, you will see the Mass Changer in the context menu. Clicking on that brings up the Mass Changer box.

The Mass Changer is actually very simple to use but very powerful in its ability to save time. When the Mass Changer box pops up, you will see two drop down boxes and a Properties section down at the bottom. The first drop down box simply asks what field you want to mass change. The second drop down box displays the kind of change you will make. For this example, let’s decide to change all of our Artist names from Upper Case to Mixed Case. Maybe you have a lot of records that were entered into the data in all upper case and then you have several records with mixed case in the library. First, right click on the Artist field name in the data and find Mass Changer in the context menu. Click it to bring up the Mass Changer box. “Artist,” will already be filled in for the Target field and you can go right to the operation drop down box. In that box, find “Convert Text To Mixed Case,” and choose it. Now, in the Properties section, you can choose to change all songs or just marked songs and you can choose to confirm each change or not. When you hit OK, MusicMaster changes your songs from upper case to mixed case and makes any other adjustments it sees throughout the Artist field data that require a change.

See? What could have taken you hours or maybe days has just taken less than a minute. What a time saver! Not only that, you can peruse the list of changes you can make within the Mass Changer and you will find that the options are endless with all of the things you can do there. Maybe you want to assign a specific keyword to a large list of songs. Maybe you want to assign a specific attribute to a group of songs. You might even need to remove data from a song or clear out a field altogether. All of that can be done with the Mass Changer in MusicMaster. What options you have will change depending on the field you pick.

I encourage you to explore all of the creative ways you can modify your data using this powerfull feature. You will find more time for other things when you use it to manage your MusicMaster database. Happy scheduling!

By Marianne Burkett

Many times a client will call asking what is the best way to adjust all clocks in a database, without the fear of failure. Now of course, you could just open your assignment grids and start making your changes – clock by clock until the clocks were all corrected. However, if you have a large number of clocks, the process may take more time than you have, or you might want to tinker a bit. We have a feature we think you’ll like: Cloning your assignment grid and creating all new clock codes when doing so! This feature is available in the latest service releases of version 4 MusicMaster for Windows, and I’ve found it to be a simple way enable clients to take their time with clock changes and then test them before actually making the switch. Dataset/Clocks/Assignment Grids/Clone and make sure you check the box that says “Create new copies of all assigned clocks”. What MusicMaster will do is take your original clocks, rename them and the new clocks will be set in your new, cloned assignment grid. Remember, before making major changes to your database – please go to Tools/Backup and perform a Standard Backup. A backup a day keeps the nightmares away!

Here are a couple ways to check/fill unscheduled positions quickly.

First two ways to check for them…

1) DATASET-SCHEDULE-QUICK VIEW. There are icons available here that will allow you to jump right to the hour you want to start “fixing”.

2)DATASET-SCHEDULE-RECAP REPORT, click on the CATEGORY STATS icon to see the number of unscheduled positions you have for the last scheduling session by category.

Now to fill them quickly.

In the Schedule Editor, if you have the TOOLS-OPTIONS-SCHEDULE EDITOR OPTIONS set to: Rule Failures to search for: “Bypass all scheduled songs” and the check box CHECKED for “Stop on unscheduled positions” you can utilize the CTRL-N function in the schedule editor to jump to each unscheduled position and fill them before you begin your “general” manual editing process.

By Paul Ziino

Have an attribute code in the database that you no longer wish to use? You can delete it! Simply go to Dataset/Library/Attributes. There you can use the drop-down menu to select which attribute to edit (Sound, Tempo, Gender, etc). Then click on the code you wish to remove and hit the Delete key on your keyboard and it's gone!

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.

By Marianne Burkett

It happens. You go to open your data, and you get a message “database may be damaged or in use on another workstation” or “database is locked”. The first thing you should check is your Windows Task Manager and look at the list of applications running. If MusicMaster is running – shut down each instance, with the task manager. Try to open the database again. If it still won’t open, and you network your data – check the task manager on other workstations as well. It is possible someone else has their MMwin running more than once. If you cannot find anyone using the database and it lives out there on a server – restart the server. If you are still unable to open the data – call your Music Scheduling Consultant for assistance.

By Marianne Burkett

Summer is coming and thoughts of warm afternoons at the park, pool or beach start circling your brain. You can’t wait. What you’re wondering right now is should you adjust your station programming to reflect the psychology of the season? Is that going to cause you hours of agonizing work in editing logs, or can you easily adjust your rules to force those summer fun songs into each hour? (more…)