MusicMaster Blog

By Dave Tyler

Some people just like things the way they like them and don’t want them to ever change. I am one of them. I remember kicking and screaming my way into digital audio editing when our last reel-to-reel machine was on its last leg and then doing it again when we went from SAW to CoolEdit Pro! I am one of those who would still use Windows XP if I could!

MusicMaster 7.0 is our latest and by far greatest version of MusicMaster. It is powerful, robust and cutting edge. Simply put there is no other product in its class. Over the years MusicMaster users would upgrade and hit the ground running because the Icons and Buttons remained mostly the same. However with the release of 7.0 those icons got a lot slicker. After all when you move from an automobile to a rocket ship you expect a little more flash right? I do! But again as someone who shuns change, I loved my old icons. No worries my friend our Development Team feels your pain and if you are ready to move to 7 but love your old buttons, you can still have them! Just go to Tools/Options/Theme-Display Options and choose “Previous Style” (pic below). Click Apply then OK and voila’ you are back to being old school! Also be sure to check out the other various and cool themes there too. You can also read about our new themes in this blog article.

As always, contact your Music Scheduling Consultant if you have any questions.

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 Marianne Burkett

As someone with many years of MusicMaster under my belt, I’ve often found myself painstakingly going down a vast list of categories and one by one picking custom colors for each category. It got to the point where I would just begin the process at the far left or right of the color spectrum and go in either direction. I can always spot a database which has categories I’ve custom colored. What’s my trademark? All non-music is colored Gray.

In MusicMaster Pro Version 7 we have a new feature that will save you time coloring Categories. Go to Dataset/Library/Category Editor. You’ll see a brand-new button on the right called “Colors”.

Click on Colors and you’ll see Color Palette’s listed on the left. Select your preference and click OK.

As you can see here I did not apply this to the Non-Music categories as I prefer the use of vivid colors on music and something muted or grey in non-music to break things up. This helps me visually when editing logs or the clocks.

You may find a palette that works for you in “Colors” and this is a great optional feature for those of you in a pinch for time. It’s also great if you just want to change up the colors for something different. I’m more inclined to D-I-Y my colors as I have a degree in design from “Cracker Jack” himself. Whichever way you chose, you can make your categories as colorful as you’d like.

Any questions? Call your Music Scheduling Consultant or the Support line.

By Paul Ziino

Head to Dataset/Analysis/Turnover Analysis. Once it loads in the upper half of the screen you’ll see all your categories and a number of columns. You can add and subtract columns by right-clicking in that upper half and checking additional columns. The column we’re discussing today is “Hour Exposure.”

Hour Exposure is the percent of hours a song from that category will play in before repeating in an hour. The highest number you will see is 95.83% which indicates a song is predicted to play in all hours before repeating in one of them. The lower the percent, the fewer the hours the song will hit before repeating in an hour.

If you have a category that doesn’t play 24/7 its Hour Exposure percent will drop. If category X only plays from 6pm-6am, that eliminates 50% of the hours, so the highest score you’ll see is 45.83%. If the category is only played in 6 hours of the 24 hour broadcast day, the highest hour exposure possible will be 20.83%.

When we are using Turnover Analysis to look at predicted rotations, we’re looking to maximize the Hour Exposure, without causing stacking in the predicted play rotation. Looking at Category A we have a 45.83% hour exposure. We do see some stacking in the predicted play history.

If we adjust the slot count up and down we can see how this will change not only the Hour Exposure, but also the predicted rotation.

In this example, not only is the Hour Exposure lower, but the predicted rotation is pretty rotten, too.

Following is an example where we get that stairstep but still have a low Hour Exposure. That’s because the rotation is predicted to hit the same six hours over and over.

Add three more songs to the category and your Hour Exposure jumps to the perfect 95.83%.

As always, if you have any questions, please follow up with your MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant.

By Jesus Rodriguez

This blog on how to clone a log is for MusicMaster Verison 7 and later. If you are not currently using version 7, we invite you to go to help and check for update or contact a MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant for information on how to upgrade. However, have no fear if, for some reason out of your control you are not allowed to upgrade to version 7 by your superiors, you can still clone your logs. I must admit it just takes a few more steps to accomplish. If you are using an older version of MusicMaster, here is a blog article on how to clone.

You can easily clone a log or portion of a log by using the menu to access this option (DATASET-SCHEDULE-CLONE HOURS):

You then will select the start and end hour to copy from, and the start hour to copy to.

One side note, if there are any locked elements in the copy from or to part of this operation, the process will not continue and will indicate:

If you haven’t upgraded to version 7.0 the following may convince you to do so. Why you ask? Well thanks for asking, we have added some additional options as show in the image below.

Now in Version 7 and above there are almost endless possibilities of combinations of what you can clone or not clone. The first option is obvious and what it was since the feature was created to replace the hours with an exact copy of the hours you are cloning. Here comes the cool part: the ability to only clone specific items. Let’s say you replay a countdown show as an example that airs on Saturday morning and it airs again on Sunday afternoon. Well now you can select to only copy the Music Library Elements over should you have a different on-air personality hosting the second airing. This allows you to schedule the non-music elements on the second log specific to the second jocks needs.

The second and third options for only cloning non music and break note elements. How would that be useful? Well, what if you have a show that is voice tracked that also airs on multiple days but maybe you don’t want the same music airing around those cuts. Now you can clone just the break note, non-music library elements, or both to the rebroadcasted hours then schedule a different set of music around them. This is great for talk shows that you may rebroadcast but may want to use different bumper music than what you scheduled for the first broadcast.

Yes, that’s not all there’s more! With the two final options you can also append extra elements to the end of the hour and remove extra elements from the end of the target hour.

With these variations, you have the tools to copy your log exactly as needed.

Please call your Music Scheduling Consultant if you have any questions.

The latest service release for PRO 7 is now available with various issues resolved and many new features.  New options include the ALT-F5 option in the Schedule Editor to swap songs without the clock elements that they were scheduled in; new Schedule Editor Key Mapping options to Toggle Display to adjust your element mask; menu options to find and hide the open floating panels now also applies to Schedule Editor panels; there is a new design property available when printing or exporting logs that allows you to count the Unscheduled elements using estimated run times like you see in the Editor; the history graph printed report for play and shift history now includes the category; and, there are several new and adjusted Special History Reports including Italy SIAE 2019, GEMA\GVL and ICASA.  While still a work in progress, there is also updated Help in both Spanish (Mexican) and French.  Go to Help, Check for Updates to get this new version.

There is also a new service release for PRO 6.  This contains the Special History Report updates mentioned above.

By Malcolm Sinclair

How is your Broadcast Week?  No, we’re not talking about Numeris or PPM’s or Diary’s.  We’re talking about keeping yourself on the straight and narrow with the CRTC and your reporting.

If you allow multiple people to access your data and you do not have any security in place, sometimes it’s a good idea to go and check some critical settings inside MusicMaster.

Many stations have different conditions of licenses (COL) depending on CanCon requirements, Cat2 and Cat 3, Hit Non-Hit etc.  That said, one thing we all have in common for Canadian Radio is the Broadcast Week.

When you have a moment, open MusicMaster, go to Tools/Options and look for Broadcast Week and make sure it is set to Sunday starting at Midnight. This will make sure that any CRTC reporting you run will be accurate.  That’s for Radio only!!

If you are one of our Canadian TV users, set it to Monday at 6am.

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

While MusicMaster is designed to schedule your music elements, it can be utilized to schedule simple traffic elements. Follow along as we go through the steps necessary to make that happen.

First create a category where you will enter these elements. While you could use LogNotes to accomplish this, we recommend a category and “song” card so that affidavits can be used. More on that in a bit, but first, let’s discuss the category setup. Under Library, Categories, create a new category:

Notice we set the Category Type to Non-Music Songs. This is not only true since the category will contain your spots, but important so the elements do not interfere with any rules you have applied to your music categories. You’ll want to create as many of these categories as you need in order to schedule the spots.

Next, add “song” cards to these categories, one for each spot. If you are using a playout system, you will want to enter the traffic element and include the necessary file numbers. We would suggest you also include all the specific information that will identify the spot including the sponsor and title. You could use the “artist” field to contain the sponsor information if you’d like. You may need a field where you can indicate the monetary value of the spot. If you do not have a Numeric-Currency field in your data, you can add one under Library, Fields. There are built-in fields in MusicMaster for Start Date/Hour and End Date/Hour. These can be useful if the spot has a specific schedule that must be followed. There is also a Kill Plays field that could be used if a spot can only have a specific number of plays.

Our illustration shows the Sponsor in the Artist field, the Title of the spot, the runtime and value (Cost) of the spot each time it airs.

With the traffic spots added, you can now determine how those will be included in your clocks. You might consider simply calling for the category. This would be considered “run of schedule” in the traffic world. When the category is scheduled, one of the spots will be scheduled. You might consider having multiple categories for this to allow for certain spots to run at certain times of the day or you could daypart the spots to accomplish that.

In this sample clock, you can see that the Traffic – Daytime category has been added in two places, each listing the category more than once. This has the effect of scheduling multiple spots in the same break.

If you need a specific spot at a specific time, we would recommend you include a Forced Element your clock which allows you to pick a specific element at a specific location in the hour. For instance, if you have a sponsor for a feature, using a Forced element would ensure that happened. In our example, the local record store, Vinyl Memories, sponsors the top five countdown. You can see the Forced position calling for their specific spot during the countdown.

As you can see, some thought should be put into how you organize the traffic elements before you start to add the elements into the clock.

Once you have determined the best approach for your situation and have added the elements to the clocks, you’re basically done. It’s unlikely that you would need Rules on these categories, although you could choose to do so if necessary. When you schedule the log, you will now see these traffic elements much like you see the songs.

Here’s how the countdown hour appears:

The placeholders can be filled in with the appropriate songs when the countdown is determined.

With a scheduled log, you can also run an affidavit by going to Analysis, Special Library Reports. The AirPlay Affidavit will allow you to specify which categories to include along with Report Options with appropriate fields. In our example, we selected the T1 category. Notice Sponsor=Artist and Value=Cost.

If you needed to do this for all of your spots at one time, you can do this by calling up those categories in the Library, then doing a right-click to select Print, All Songs from the context menu. The AirPlay Affidavit will then be pre-filtered for the categories you selected.

The resulting report will show you the date/time of each play for the spot that aired in the time frame. Since we included a monetary value in the cost field, the report also calculates the value of the spots aired.

With a little set-up you can easily manage simply traffic tasks with MusicMaster.

Should you have any questions, reach out to your Music Scheduling Consultant.

By Dave Tyler

MusicMaster has always been the leader in flexible ways to schedule the sound you want to hear on your radio station. For decades great programmers have put together themed weekends and shows with a few clicks using Special Sets and Saved Lists. We have all heard “The Sales Department makes money and the Programming Department spends it all”! Specialty programming, either during the week or on the weekends is a great way to offer your Sales Department a product they can make money on via sponsorships.

You can search our blogs and videos and find lots of articles and walkthroughs on Special Sets and Saved Lists but what I want to talk about today is a new feature in MusicMaster Pro version 7.0 called “Find Similar” that gives you another tool in your toolbox to locate songs and save them in lists to use for your specialty programming.

Let’s say for example I am programming a Light AC station and at 8am and 8pm each day I want a segment called “The 80’s Ladies at 8” that I can sell a sponsorship for. I can open my entire music library and find a single song that matches my criteria, for example, Tina Turner “What’s Love Got To Do With It”. At this point right click in the column of an attribute like Role or Era and select “Find Similar Attributes”.

This pulls up the “Similar Attributes” dialog box and we have some choices from the dropdown that determine how exact we want this list to match.

Depending on what level of “Exactness” you choose determines how many songs you get. If you are just looking for female singers with 80’s hits well you got ‘em! If you want more exactness it will also grab similar tempos etc. You can set the fields you want to see and search on by clicking the “Design” button and pulling up the “Edit Grid Layout” box which is similar to your “Show/Hide” box in the Editor.

Once you have the fields you selected click ok. When you have the list you want simply click on the “Save List” button, name your list and click ok.

You now have a “80’s Ladies” saved list that you can program from by selecting the “Saved List” element type in your clock and then choosing your list from the dropdown.

This a great new feature in MusicMaster Pro 7.0. Stay tuned for more on this version and be sure to search our brand new, completely redone and awesome Help section in MusicMaster. It includes videos and more!

By Brian Wheeler

Once in a while, I’ll have a couple back-to-back phone calls from MusicMaster users that will give me an idea for blog content. This blog is a result of such a phenomenon.

The first call was from a programmer who played a good amount of gold that were regional hits and wanted to manage those tracks so they didn’t have quite the same impact as the regular gold in his categories. With a couple of tweaks we’d set up two kinds of packets for him.

The first kind of packets we set up were standard packets for his depth cuts from core regional artists. These were all ‘bubbling under’ tracks that were still pretty big regionally but didn’t do much nationally. He wanted them to continue to get exposure but at a reduced level from the rest of the category. We talked about how the size of the packets determined their exposure. A packet of 2 splits the exposure in half. A packet of 3 reduces exposure by 66%, etc. It’s that pesky math, always creeping into programming.

Here’s a sample of what his standard packets would look like:

For the songs we were packeting, a standard packet was going to get the job done. These songs didn’t have much that was going to prevent them from scheduling as far as rules go. So when that packet came up in the schedule order, the song at the top of the packet was scheduled, then sent back to the bottom of the packet list and the next song in the packet would be considered the next time around. It was perfect.

But then he had some one-hit wonders that he also wanted to control with packets, and some of those songs regularly challenged his rules. He found that he was getting unscheduled positions when he’d encounter these packets and it was causing him to rethink the packet concept. I proposed the diggable packet, which allowed MusicMaster to dig through the packet to find a song that satisfied his rules. He loved that idea. His minimum rest rule would prevent these songs from playing too frequently, but if he ran into the rare one-hit wonder within that packet that violated the rule it wouldn’t prevent the scheduler from finding a song that DIDN’T violate. He was reducing his exposure to these songs and still able to focus on the other aspects of his programming rather than micromanage a handful of one-hit wonders that he rarely wanted to appear.

The next call I got was from a programmer who wanted to play live versions of a particular song, but in a reduced ratio to the regular recording of the song. She didn’t have many live versions that she wanted to play, but enough where she felt there needed to be an element of control. I proposed the weighted packet. She could place the live version in a packet with the regular version, then control the ratio to regular plays to live plays by placing a weight on the regular version. In some situations, she applied a ‘2’ to the regular version when the live version was a hit, but she still wanted the regular version to play twice for every single live version play. Then on a few others where the live version wasn’t a hit and she just wanted to add flavor, she applied a ‘3’ or a ‘4’ to the regular version. This meant the regular version would play that many times before the live version would come up for airplay.

Control achieved. She is still playing the live version, but at a reduced rate and very much within her comfort zone.

If you’ve not created a packet before or would like a refresher course, here’s a brief video demonstrating creation of packets.

If you have any questions, please reach out to your Music Scheduling Consultant for assistance.