MusicMaster Blog

by Paul Ziino

Whether you want to schedule a bunch of “car” songs leading up to the Indy 500 or “patriotic” songs for Independence Day, Theme Scheduling can get the job done. Here’s how in 10 easy steps… (more…)

By Marianne Burkett

What is a “Virtual Show”?  Here we’ll define it and give you some examples of how you might use it. (more…)

By Marianne Burkett

What is the “Format Scheduler”?

In a nutshell, the Format Scheduler allows you to pre-schedule your Clocks and Assignment Grids in advance on a calendar.  You can also “rotate” your Assignment Grids.

The Format Scheduler gives you the ability to “override” your active assigned clocks for a pre- determined time frame for a date range, or perhaps for just one hour on a particular day. Just what you need if you would like to have different clocks in place for the holiday Monday coming up (perhaps you have a specialty weekend or count down planned, or simply will be voice tracked Monday) and need to have those clocks in place to export to your automation system.

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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…)

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 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…)