MusicMaster Blog

Alternate Categories
by Paul Ziino

We’ve talked about using History Links in MusicMaster Pro to accomplish what is commonly referred to as “Alternate Categories” in music scheduling software (http://www.musicmaster.com/?p=557). As more and more companies look toward the future and make the switch to MusicMaster Client-Server (MMCS), I thought this would be a good time to demonstrate how easily this is done in MMCS.

To begin, MMCS is intended to be used by larger groups where the desire is to maintain one central library (Enterprise) that is shared with multiple scheduling databases (Stations). All the library is in Enterprise, and a box is checked to share the songs with the various stations.

In this image we have a list of songs and you can see that each can be assigned to any available station in the database. Here we see that two songs which are circled are actually shared to two different stations.

Now we go into a single station and open a category. Click on the Edit Helper Box in the Category field.

The list of available categories in the station appears. Here you can check any/all categories in which you want this song to reside. Note that when you do check additional categories, the Category field will display whichever category is listed first in the Info Bar.

Now this song will rotate in both the A and B categories. Why do this? Maybe you want it to rotate in a faster turning category at night and in a slower turning category during the day (make sure to daypart them accordingly). Maybe it rotates in regular rotation during the week, but on weekends you feature a different category set and want that song to rotate in the weekend categories as well as the weekday categories.

There are lots of differences between MusicMaster Pro and MusicMaster Client-Server. If your organization would like to learn more about MMCS please contact your MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant. They’ll be happy to answer your questions!