MusicMaster Blog

By Paul Ziino

I’ve been working with a new customer lately.  The programmers at these stations like to schedule in passes.  First pass they schedule all the currents, then edit and review.  Second pass they schedule their recurrents, then edit and review.  Third pass is the rest of their music, then edit and review.  And their fourth pass is of all the non-music categories.

To make this easier, we built Category Groups.  This is done via Dataset/Library/Categories, then click Groups and New.  Name the group (Pass 1), check the categories to be included in that first pass and click OK.  Create another new group (Pass 2), and so on.  No need to create a category group for the non-music categories—that one is built-in.

Now when they launch the automatic scheduler, they can use the pull-down under “Categories to Schedule” to select which pass they wish to run, and only those categories will be listed and scheduled.  They’ve found this to be a lot easier than checking and un-checking from within the list of categories there.  By the way, they also check the box “Do not advance last schedule date/hour” so that each time they go to schedule the next pass, they needn’t reset the date/hours to be scheduled.

For more ideas or help, just reach out to your friendly MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant or check out our many blog articles and training videos.

By Jesus Rodriguez

As you probably already know MusicMaster is the most customizable scheduling software in the industry. Whether it’s a particular layout design, specific additional fields, print designs, multi user personalization, you name it!

In this blog I’d like you to think out side the box and about how else you can use MusicMaster in your everyday life whether it’s for your day-to-day work or other things.

You may not know but during my down time I take part in a series of mix shows that range in a variety of formats from CHR, Country, Urban, Rock/Alternative, Latin, Classic Rock, and more. Trying to keep an inventory check of all of my music and music videos by simply searching my hard drive of over 25 years of doing this can be a nightmare especially when I need to find specific items that fit specific stations or events. Shown below you see a screen shot of some of my music inventory. I used a yes/no field that allows me to select the items I think would be good for a bar/club, live gig, etc. I took it a step further to keep track if I have the music video for the song because yup you guessed I love mixing music videos to be more interactive at my gigs. You also use an attribute field to do the same thing.

If I get a call from a venue, event, or even a station that wants me do mixes for them I can ask them a simple question. What is your vision for the mix show/event music? No matter how they respond, I can quickly filter through my library to find that specific kind of music or videos for a gig by using the sound codes for the genres, if I have remixes available, tempo, moods, etc. This is so convenient when the call comes in that a station or event wants the mix to be up-tempo, CHR, EDM remixes, with some 80’s, and top 5 urban tracks, etc. If this were a live venue scenario I can take it a step further to filter that with the items that have a video available.

Faster than I can respond to book myself I already have my filtered library to either use as a reference when searching through my hard drive for what I need or have on me just in case I go blank at the gig. The more details I put on my songs the more I can filter. As an open format DJ involved with all kinds of stations and venues, this is so much easier than spending hours or days prepping through my hard drive song by song.

You can do this in all versions of MusicMaster. Even if you’re a DJ on a budget, you can do the same thing I am with our MusicMaster PE, Personal Edition product. It’s designed for just this type of use. You can go to www.musicmaster.com and purchase a copy right now. Think outside the box and let MusicMaster schedule your DJ show or even your next dinner party!

By Marianne Burkett

You’ve made a new clock or adjusted an old clock, it is in your active assignment grid, and no matter what you do the new clock or changes are not showing up in your logs.  There are a few easy things to check before getting flustered.

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By Jerry Butler

MusicMaster has many shortcuts built in.  Here are a few tips to make your library maintenance and editing even easier.

Did you know you can use some basic Windows shortcuts in MusicMaster?  Would you like to copy your library or a category into Excel?  Pull up the categories or groups you would like to copy into your library maintenance view, select all fields you would like to copy, use CTRL+C to copy and CTRL+V to paste into Excel.

You can use this same feature to paste from one field to another in MusicMaster or add music directly from an Excel document into MusicMaster.  This is often used when copying your title field over to your title keyword field.   You can copy hundreds or even thousands of titles over in seconds compared to having to type out all those titles again.

When you are setting this up, make sure your fields line up the same way in both places.  If the paste doesn’t go like you wanted, you can to Edit, Undo to remove it.  It’s never a bad idea to make a backup of your data prior to any large data change.

If you need to copy coding for new songs you add for your automation system categories, prefix or other fields, you can select the data that is correct in the field above and then select all fields needed below and use the CTRL-D to copy that same code to lines below.

These are just two of many shortcuts throughout the entire program.  For a complete list of shortcuts in MusicMaster, click on Help and search shortcuts.  Print them out and save yourself some time.  Check out this blog article by Dave Tyler for more information on Custom Hot Keys too.

By Dave Tyler

If creating clocks with Lognotes in them is driving you crazy well I’m with you! I am a Radio Programmer not a Computer Programmer! The last thing I want to do is sit down and type over and over cryptic letters and symbols like Matthew Broderick in War Games (Yeah, I still think that was a cool movie despite the fact that my cell phone now has more power than the computers in that movie did!). It is tiring and although every automation system has their own unique codes, delimiters and requirements to make the magic happen, if you dare leave out a comma or carrot”^” then the whole thing doesn’t work and to make things worse you clocks are filled with them!

I have some good news for shortcut lovers everywhere. In MusicMaster Version 5.0 and higher the process has been made much easier.

When building a new clock just click on the clock icon tab at the bottom of your Info Bar then select the “Lognotes” button and viola all of your lognotes are right there.

Now adding them to your clocks is easy. Find the lognote you need to use and drag it into your clock where you want it.

Create a lognote once and never type it again! This is especially useful when you have a lot of clocks that share the same lognotes for stopsets, liners, IDs, etc.

Two other benefits:  With the entire list displayed, you may find another lognote that better suits your needs and it should be pretty easy to spot something that doesn’t look correct because the alignment is off.  For instance, you can see in the above example that all the ,,COM,DALIVE lines look the same from line to line.  If a comma was missing, it wouldn’t look that neat.

Drag and Drop, Copy and Paste are some of the wonderful, ease of use features you can take advantage of within MusicMaster. Save time and get back to programming your great radio station and crushing the competition.

If you have any questions, contact your MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant and we’ll be happy to answer your questions.