MusicMaster Blog

Music Scheduling Therapy

By Chris Malone

If you have had the privilege of sitting in a therapy session, you are aware of the benefits of having someone look at your life’s configuration and help recommend ways to get back on track. Did you know in MusicMaster, you have a built-in music scheduling therapist at your disposal too? One of the overlooked features in your Rule Tree is the Rule Wizard that gives you a list of recommendations to make to your rule tree based upon your last scheduling session.

This feature helps determine rotations miscalculations and rules that may be off-base due to the lack of available inventory in your actively scheduled music and non-music categories. The Rule Wizard can pinpoint problems with rest settings, hour rotation rules, and indicate how your attribute rules affected the scheduling session. If you notice an abundance of unscheduled positions in your most recent scheduling session, you may want to review this list and see what your MusicMaster therapist recommends.

Additionally, you can benefit from learning how to read your scheduler recap report (Dataset, Schedule, Recap Report). In this recap report, you can sort the pass percentage column by descending order, which shows me the rules that had lowest percentage of songs that pass any given active rule (both breakable and unbreakable). Watch out for unbreakable rules that have a low pass percentage, it indicates problems with that category’s ability to tolerate the current rule setup. Remember, this is a picture of the last scheduling session. You may wish to make some notes over the course of a week before making any changes to rules or other settings.

(For even more info on the Scheduler Recap report, check out this other blog article on the topic.)

You can lean on your built-in MusicMaster scheduling therapist or you can call your MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant, have a seat on the couch and tell us your problems.

by Paul Ziino

The Scheduling Recap Report (Dataset/Schedule/Recap Report) is a great tool for determining which unbreakable rules are causing unscheduled positions in your log as well as which breakable rules are being violated. (more…)

Here is a handy daily “report card” for your MusicMaster database.

The Recap Report is a graphic display of how the program did in relation to the rules that you have set up.

There are three types of Recap Reports you can view: Rule Stats, Goal Stats and Category Stats.

Here is a brief description of each:

Rule Stats
This display gives you detailed information on each rule that was tested.

Goal Stats
This report is activated when you use Optimum Goal Scheduling. You can sort by any of the column headers that you have.

When using Optimum Goals Scheduling, you’ll see one entry for each category where that Goal is used.

Category Stats
This graph gives you information on how far into the search depth the scheduler had to go to find the songs it scheduled

There are other options to view the Thinking file, Print the Recap Report, or Copy it to a clip board or Word document (as an example).

You can view this report immediately after a scheduling run via DATASET-SCHEDULE-RECAP REPORT. You can also make this report open each time following an Automatic Scheduling run by selecting RUN RECAP REPORT AFTER SCHEDULING on the OPTIONS tab of the Automatic Scheduler.