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Salon de la Radio Paris Recap posted on March 1st, 2014

4,185 radio professionals joined this year’s Salon de la Radio in Paris. The three days of France’s main radio industry event were spiced-up with dozens of panels, workshops, and an award show.

We really enjoy attending this first international show of the year. It always feels great to spend some days in this very unique metropolis, and meeting good friends feels even better. ON AIR’s Thomas Roth and Mathieu Habegger from SwissMediaPartners visited the FIP crew at Radio France and longtime MusicMaster station Radio Classique. They also spent pleasant moments with Christie, Isabelle and Alexandre from Netia (top picture, below) and Dominique Wenger from Zenon Media. (bottom picture, below). NetiaDominiqueWenger_ZenonMedia

MusicMaster in Oceania posted on February 27th, 2014

ON AIR’s Kevin Hopkins spent most of this past month in New Zealand and Australia meeting stations and training future MusicMaster pros. He also had the chance to meet again with Cameron St. Clair, Sea FM’s Afternoon Announcer & Music Supporter. And, boy oh boy, this man knows his MusicMaster!

Both had interesting talks about the future of MusicMaster and API’s, MusicMaster’s potential to integrate with third party applications, and of course some wishes he has for future versions of MusicMaster.

Cameron and Kevin were joined by AVC’s Greg Altena. Greg, as the new MusicMaster distributor for Australia and New Zealand, was very happy to meet existing MusicMaster stations and long time users like Cameron.

Cameron and Greg

Cameron St. Clair (left) and Greg Altena (right)

Colorado Springs Genius Day posted on February 24th, 2014

Colorado Springs Radio Broadcasters in Colorado Springs, located about an hour right outside of Denver, Colorado, hosted Joe Knapp and Jesus Rodriguez on Monday, February 10th for a MusicMaster Genius Day workshop. Everyone was so excited about the session that they began firing questions before even saying hello. It’s great to see how much passion there is in the field about MusicMaster 5.0. We discussed every aspect of the software. We are noticing a trend at these Genius Days concerning Optimum Goal Scheduling’s new goals in version 5.0 which keeps blowing everyone away. We would like to thank Aaron Zytle and his team for coordinating the day with us. We kept our promise and even though it was exactly a week after the Super Bowl we never brought up the game in the Bronco state. Lets just say we love our clients to be happy with us when they are at arms reach.
crscoloradospringsPictured left to right: MusicMaster Representative Jesus Rodriguez; Gundy from RXP; Aaron Zytle, PD of RXP; Mehoff, MD at KILO; Ross Ford, PD at KILO; MusicMaster President and CEO Joe Knapp

MusicMaster 5.0 SR-11 is now Available posted on February 24th, 2014

icon_checkMusicMaster 5.0sr11 is now available through Help, Check for Update. Highlights include:

The Unscheduler now has an option to prevent locked elements from being unscheduled. Version 5 introduced the LogMemo feature that allows you to have a memo that appears when you open the log. Now, you’ll also be able to see the contents of the memo by just hovering over it when you view the Schedule Calendar. When the History Browser is set to display Individual Songs, you can now use the Combine Linked History option to merge the history of linked songs. You’ve long been able to set any hour, quarter- or half-hour segment in the Daypart Editor and now you’ll be able to change that split mode for all hours at one time.

These are just some of the new options you’ll have with 5.0sr11. If you have any questions, contact your personal Music Scheduling Consultant for more information.

Mel Tillis posted on February 20th, 2014

meltillisMusicMaster celebrates 30 years with Mel Tillis at our Acoustic Jam!  Your photo with  Mel will be coming to this site soon!

Thanks, Lydia! posted on February 19th, 2014

SAMSUNGIt is with great sadness that we are announcing the retirement of our receptionist and office assistant, Lydia Leitzke.

Lydia has been with us for over fourteen years, back in July 1999. She began working at MusicMaster as a receptionist and was the first voice everyone heard when calling into the corporate office. She later moved into a combined role at MusicMaster and was a tremendous help to Susan Averbeck with the daily office functions.

Although we will all miss Lydia, she has given her full devotion to MusicMaster and has earned the opportunity to enjoy more time with her family and grandchildren. We wish Lydia all the best in her retirement!

MusicMaster Get Together Tour 2014 posted on February 19th, 2014

In May we will start our MusicMaster Get Together Tour 2014 through Europe. We hope to meet as much of our customers as possible on the tour, will lead us through Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Italy and France. More details, cities and dates will be announced during the next few weeks. We are looking forward to seeing you all!

mmgettogether

Spotlight on the Keyword Separation Wizard posted on February 17th, 2014

By Aaron Taylor

As your format evolves, the competitive situation changes or you receive new research data, it often become necessary to make significant changes in your MusicMaster database. Fairly obvious items that need attention in these circumstances include revision of your clocks and assignment grid, adjustments to your Rule Tree and expansion or contraction of the size of your categories.

In this article, we’ll cover the basics of working with the MusicMaster Keyword Separation Wizard.

This helpful tool can help you make decisions on whether the AUTO or custom settings for particular artists or groups are sufficient, or if it might make sense for you to manually override those settings and either put in custom settings or change the ones that are currently set in place for particular keywords. The settings recommended are based upon the currently active clock assignment grid.

To access the Keyword Separation Wizard, go to DATASET-LIBRARY-KEYWORDS.

separationwizard_1From there, you’ll see a window open to the Keyword Maintenance screen. For the purposes of this example, use the drop down menu in the upper left hand corner and select the Artist Keywords list. You can utilize the Keyword Separation Wizard for any keyword field you wish in the future.

separationwizard_2Next, find Tools, and from the drop down list, select Separation Wizard.

separationwizard_3Then, you’ll be at this screen. Go ahead and click the Next button to continue.

separationwizard_4You’ll now be given a Calculation Properties selection box that it will be fine for you to accept the default settings offered here. Below is a brief summary describing the options here if you would like to make adjustments.

separationwizard_5Recommend separation times that are no more than what percentage of the estimated keyword turnover time. This allows for a cap on how high the recommended values can be.

Set to Auto when the recommended separation exceeds the following value.  Anything that exceeds the setting here will be set to Auto and follow the settings for keywords defined in your Rule Tree. This is the one you can have some fun with.  How about 9d, 7h, 23m or 11d, 5h, 42m? What would happen?  You don’t have to accept any settings when you click Next, so see how much separation you can really get.  You don’t have to be worried about core artists, they will get some of the smallest times while your one-hit-wonders will have some of the longest. There are no “rules” here as far as what is acceptable, which is why we encourage you to make something up and put it in to see what happens.  We’ll talk about how you can see what it did when you get to the next screen.

Round recommended separation times to the nearest:  Allows you to fine tune the Wizard settings.

Avoid full-hour recommendations – This will adjust the suggested values either slightly higher or lower if the suggested separation value ends up being something like 1:00.

Don’t recommend values that are higher than the existing settings. No recommendations made for these if selected.

Remove separation from keywords that do not require any.  It will perform this operation if selected.

Recommend basic Hour Rotation settings. The Wizard will perform this operation if selected.

Once you’ve reviewed your setting choices, again click the Next box. The Keyword Separation Wizard will then take a few moments to calculate its suggestions to you and present the following box.   In this case 19 active keywords changed.  We had 243 Artist Keywords in the database to start.  Simply math says only eight percent can’t meet the three hours we picked. That would be a hint to perhaps make the setting higher to see what might be possible. This is why it’s fun to put in a much higher setting.  You may still find that a large percentage of your Keywords can meet the setting you pick.

separationwizard_6Next, you’ll be offered choices on how to view the suggested changes. Again, you can accept the default settings here if you wish.

Now, go ahead and review your list. Click twice on the header column for Recommended to see all of the recommended changes sorted together in the teal colored list.

separationwizard_7At this point, you may elect to Change All of the keywords the wizard has suggested to the separations or hour rotations indicated. If you’d like to just change specific ones to the settings indicated, click in each line and select Change to make adjustment on that one specific keyword.  Additionally, you can override the current setting or the recommended setting for any or all of the keywords by simply clicking in the box for Separation and/or Hour Rotation and selecting your own preferences.

separationwizard_8Even if you haven’t had the need to radically revamp your database for the reasons mentioned at the start, we’d suggest that it would be a great idea at least to review this list every six months or so. Inevitably, the prominence or importance of certain artists in any given format will ebb and flow over time. That separation setting of forty eight minutes you set on a particular artist or group when they were really “hot” in the format or had just released a new album will seem perhaps too aggressive or liberal six months to a year down the road. Also, you may want to set the separations and hour rotations for much longer periods of time for one off, novelty or potentially very “polar” artists in your format.

If you have questions about fully utilizing the power the MusicMaster Separation Wizard, schedule some time with your Music Scheduling Consultant for further assistance.

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MusicMaster and Broadcast Electronics posted on February 16th, 2014

Shane Finch also stopped over in Quincy, Illinois to visit the headquarters of Broadcast Electonics. He was greeted by Tim Bealor, who was recently promoted to become BE’s new President.

timbe

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