MusicMaster Blog

By Jerry Butler

Talking with programmers daily and attending numerous MusicMaster Genius Days, I often find that programmers would like additional training, but don’t know that it is available. MusicMaster offers FREE online training with your MusicMaster subscription. If you are looking for MusicMaster 101 training for a new employee, new student team for your college station, or you want more advanced training for a seasoned vet, we can help you out. Our Music Scheduling Consultants can login and use your stations database for training, so everything looks familiar to your team. Contact your Music Scheduling Consultant today to schedule your MusicMaster training.

In addition, you can review hundreds of videos and blogs by clicking on the learn tab on our website. Check out blogs, short-form and long-form videos for the topics of your choice.

And don’t forget the Help feature in your MusicMaster software. Click Help and search for the topics that you have questions about.

Thank you again for using MusicMaster.

By W.I.Z.A.R.D

Like most software, you probably use the stuff you need. How often do you step outside your comfort zone? Have you really looked into other features MusicMaster offers to see if any of them might help you speed up your work or make your station sound better? That’s what we thought. It’s okay. We understand. That’s why we made this list. Here are 10 ideas to look into.

Autoplatoon – Move your music in and out. Check out these previous articles that discuss the benefits.

Keyword Separation Wizard – Get as much distance between your keywords possible with this feature. This is one of the places you can have a lot of fun in the software just trying separation times. Why not see if you can get 9 days, 7 hours, 35 minutes of separation? The worst thing that will happen is that every single keyword will get a specific separation time. Check out Library, Keywords, Tools, Separation Wizard and watch for an article on this topic in a few weeks.

Check the Log – Are you sure you haven’t created problems when you edited the log? Check the Log reviews the log for whatever rules are of most interest to you (some or all, your choice). It’s the best way to make sure there are no issues when you finish editing. Visit Schedule, Check the Log.

Manual Assist Scheduling – What is the benefit of filling the position at that specific moment in the log rather than after the fact? Easy. The benefit is that you will see immediately what is causing problems (so you may end up adjusting your rules), but just as important, you will have the best opportunity of finding something to put in the position with less conflicts. Try it out under Schedule, Automatic Scheduler, Options tab.

Schedule Properties Max Fails/Skips – What happens to songs that just keep failing the rules? The Schedule Properties options for Max Fails/Skips controls how those songs are handled so they don’t get “stuck” at the top of the Schedule Order. Visit Schedule, Scheduler Order.

Mark new songs and distribute them in the Category – When you add songs, mark them (make sure you don’t have any marked songs in your data already). Use the Schedule Order, Arrange option to distribute those marked songs. Now the music that is new to the category will be distributed throughout rather than all placed together. Remember to unmark songs when you are done.

AutoFill – Are you adding the same information over and over? For instance, do you add gender codes on each song? In the classical format, do you add the musical period or pronunciations information for each work? AutoFill can put this static information in for you with a couple of clicks. Review the icon in Library Maintenance.

AutoLink – If you use AutoComplete and have a large database, AutoLink can narrow down what AutoComplete finds. Go to Library, Fields to set this up this Property.

Special History Reports – Sure you probably come here to run an ASCAP/BMI or CRTC report. Have you ever looked at the top eight reports on the list? These are reports that we created at MusicMaster to help you dig down into your data. Reports here include analysis of Artist/Titles, Categories and Attributes among others. Check out Analysis, Special History Reports.

Tools, Options – Okay, we could have pulled 10 things from this area alone! Here are two that you should start with: Library Editor Options and Schedule Editor Options. You’ll find all sorts of ways to set up library defaults and searches. On the Schedule Editor option, determine how searches, inserts and direct data entry options are done as well as the ability to refine how replacement searches are done.

We realize there are lots of places to explore in MusicMaster. These are just a few of the ways MusicMaster can work harder for you. Your Music Scheduling Consultant can discuss any of these areas with you further or help you set them up. Let us know how we can help.

By Marianne Burkett

I have many clients who also happen to be programming consultants… and the times, they are a changing. Now that MusicMaster is thoroughly saturating the Music Scheduling world – many consultants want to know what the advantages are and what are the differences between MusicMaster and the other Music schedulers on the market. (more…)

By Marianne Burkett

I get this question a lot from normal folk. “Exactly, what is it that you do?”  By normal folk, I’m referring to people who reside out of the sphere of Broadcasting.

My answer varies depending on the individual asking the question, but I often say: “I help radio sound better”.  MusicMaster is indeed software that enables its users to get the best music or video logs possible. What we do is difficult to explain…even to musicians. (more…)

By Aaron Taylor

For this article, I thought I’d try to create a reference guide to some other common questions that seem to come up for us on an ongoing basis here at MusicMaster. My hope is that you’ll be able to utilize this as a “Go to Guide” the next time you have one of those “I know you showed me this once” types of questions. (more…)

By Aaron Taylor

So, here it is…The end of the first month of the year.
How are those New Year’s resolutions working out for you? Even if many (or all of them) have fallen by the wayside at this point, the way I look at it, it’s still not too late. Here is one completely achievable New Year’s goal, resolve to more fully utilize one of the most important tools in your programming arsenal…MusicMaster!

Perhaps you’ve seen or heard about some of the features and functionality I’ll touch upon here, but either you’ve never had the time (or the knowledge) to put them into practice or maybe you weren’t even aware they existed. Let’s resolve to change that today. (more…)

by Aaron Taylor

In this article, we thought it would be helpful to run you through some “under the hood” areas of MusicMaster for Windows that you may have never had the opportunity to see before, or perhaps had poked around in these corners and always thought, “hmm, I wonder what this does” and figured you’d either ask your MSC about these areas, or might read up on those areas someday. Someday is today! This article is meant as an overview to these areas. We’ll be looking to write more about these areas in the future in more detail. In the meantime, if you have any questions about these areas, just contact us and we’ll be happy to discuss the areas with you in more detail. (more…)

by Aaron Taylor

So here (in no particular order) are the top five questions I am asked about MusicMaster. (more…)

by Paul Ziino

If you are a new MusicMaster user starting out with a brand new database, I like to recommend a few simple rules to get things going. (more…)

We have welcomed many new users to MusicMaster in the past 30 years. For many of you, that meant having your data converted from other scheduling software. Your converted data was returned to you set up, and ready for you to schedule and export a log to your automation system. (more…)