MusicMaster Blog

By Marianne Burkett

Depending on your “normal” habits of adding music to your MusicMaster library, you may not be aware of a convenient feature that is available: the CD Ripper . (more…)

By Marianne Burkett

The holidays are approaching fast, so here’s a summary of the things you need to be thinking about as you get ready to add Christmas music to your rotations. (more…)

Exactly what is “Auto Kick”?

As a review, the Auto Kick rule property is used to prevent a song from playing at the same time on consecutive days. You can adjust the windows size, which is the amount of time around a play yesterday that you would like to protect. (more…)

by Paul Ziino

When you open your Rule Tree (Dataset/Rule Tree or click the Lightning Bolt icon on your Toolbar), you open a world full of possibilities. Today we look at a couple rules found under each code within your “Attribute Field Rules”. (more…)

We get calls and emails fairly often from clients asking us how to create a specific type of report. Perhaps it’s a report that the General Manager or consultant has asked for, or maybe it’s a report you need for reporting purposes to a record label, regulatory agencies, or just internal programming department research or verification.

Our intention in this article is to give a brief “roadmap” as to where in MusicMaster you can locate many of these frequently requested reports, and a brief overview of the options available.

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Library Analysis

Need to get a quick overview of the number of “5” tempo songs in your active categories, or the percentage of “Pop” coded songs you have in a selected category?

Use the Library Analysis feature. Here’s how to do it:

Open Library Maintenance and click into the field you wish to analyze. Right-click on the field and select Library Analysis. A box will pop up with the Analysis. For instance, if you wanted to review the gender codes in your data, you could right-click on that field and after selecting Library Analysis, a data box will appear.

The drop-down box on the left-hand side of the display allows you to pick a different field from the one you are currently looking at. A drop-down on the right-side allows you to determine the way the information is displayed. The number of unique values for the field currently being viewed will be listed at the bottom of the box.

Depending upon what field you are in, you may not get the option for Individual Codes and Code Groups. For instance, this option is not available when analyzing the Artist field. The first option in the drop-down box is List Statistics. This can be useful to determine how many songs are included, are the songs from music or non-music categories, what is the total running time of the songs included on the list, and what is the average run time of the songs on the list.

If you would like a printed report of the analysis, you can use the toolbar option to do so or if you’d like to copy this list to a spreadsheet, select the copy option.

We get calls/emails on a regular basis from clients who report they are getting more unscheduled positions than they’d like. Perhaps they’ve just updated the library, changed format clocks (or programming formats completely), have created the database from scratch, or (frequently) they’ve “inherited” the database from a PD or MD that is no longer part of the organization. Here is a checklist of sorts to help you attempt to figure out why you are getting these unscheduled positions and what you may be able to do to reduce their numbers.

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Remember if you are setting up to run a BMI report (or many other special history reports for that matter) for the first time, it is CRITICAL that you point the Artist Name and Song Title fields in the report template to the fields in your database that contain this data. Otherwise, you will generate a completely blank report. (more…)

From time to time, we’ll get a call or email from a user who indicates they think that they’ve “lost” one or both of these tool bars in the schedule editor.

How do you get these to reappear? Look for the icon at the top of the schedule editor that looks like a red martini glass (we’ve heard it called many other things, but this is the best description I’ve found). This is the “Show/Hide Elements”. Click on this icon, and on the Schedule Editor Options box that pops up, select the “Toolbars” tab. You will see the “Hour Selection” and “Results” bar options here. Make sure your desired options are checked. Click OK…Voila!

Here’s a great way to “get a handle” on the content and set up of a Rule Tree in MusicMaster. Print it! Click on the printer icon in the center section of the split screen (it is right above the bold MusicMaster Rule Tree header). (more…)