MusicMaster Blog

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.

By Paul Ziino

I know we’ve talked about it before.  However, I regularly am asked “why are my artists playing so close to themselves, but not indicating any rule violation?”  In 90% of these cases, the issue is that the songs either have no Artist Keywords or have the wrong Artist Keywords.

Artist Keywords are what MusicMaster uses to keep the same artist apart from themselves.

Let’s use these examples:

BEATLES
THE BEATLES
BEATLES, THE

As far as MusicMaster is concerned, those are three unique keywords and thus they wouldn’t be separated.

There is an easy way to clean these up.  Go to Dataset/Library/Keywords, then select Artist Keywords in the dropdown.  This is a list of all the Artist Keywords in the database.  Any changes you make in this list immediately update throughout the database.

Below we see the keyword “Christina Aguilera.”  If I wish to change it to “Aguilera, Christina,” just type right over the top of it.

When I do, MusicMaster alerts me that there is another keyword listed that matches and asks if I’d like to combine them.  I will click Yes, and now any song that had the “Christina Aguilera” keyword on it will be updated to the “Aguilera, Christina” keyword.

A quick suggestion:  For groups, enter the keyword as the group’s name, “LED ZEPPELIN.”  For solo artists enter the keyword last, first, “PLANT, ROBERT.”  Now when you sort your library by artist keyword, it will appear as desired.  Also, I suggest not including the leading “THE”, so just “BEATLES” or “WHO” or “EAGLES” and so on.

Once you’ve cleaned up your keywords you’ll notice that artist separation rules work better.  When artist separation is working, your whole station will sound better because you’ll have the desired rest between plays of the same artist.

By Jesus Rodriguez

Recently clients have asked me if there was a way to make sure that they are always playing specific types of songs during certain parts of the day. As an example our friends to the North in Canada have to play a specific amount of Canadian content, some Latin countries face similar regulations, and other clients just want to make sure the hours aren’t leaning to urban, pop, rock, etc.

One great tool to help with this kind of stuff is the “Custom Time Period” which is found in Tools, Options, Database Options, then Custom Time Periods. Here you can set up to five different time periods that you can use for Schedule Analysis. These might also be used to calculate Special History reports.

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