MusicMaster Blog

Auto Platoon for Classical Stations

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

If you were tempted to stop reading just because the title of this article mentioned “classical”, I encourage you to read on. Even though the examples are tailored to that format, any format can take advantage of Auto Platoon to play rested music in their format.

With so much music to choose from, classical programmers have the dilemma of how to program all of it. Honestly, you really can’t, at least not well. The question is how to take advantage of all the amazing music in your library while still maintaining appropriate turnovers for your categories. One answer is Auto Platoon. Auto Platoon lets you move pieces in and out of rotation to keep the category fresh while maintaining your category size.

We’ll start with some basic premises:

You have categories that have a general size and clocks that call for these categories in a way that you have the category turning over in a time frame you want. What that time frame is, is not important. Whether the category turns over in 30 days or 90 days, is up to you. The point is that the turnover is what you want.

There is far more music you could be playing but to do so would slow the rotation of your categories down too much.

With these things in mind, here are two different examples of how you might use Auto Platoon to take advantage of all that music.

You have all this music in your Hold categories that you do not play regularly. When you review the Hold categories, there are pieces there you’d like to play but prefer not to sacrifice the turnover of your active categories.

Create a new category for this music. When you open Schedule, Auto- Platoon, pick the original category and then this new category. Set the Move By to Category Plays so you know the piece will play in the category that many times before being available to move. We’ll skip Filters in this example. The Schedule can be what you’d like. There are many choices available. Finally pick the number of pieces you want to move. You might pick 10 pieces.

The result is that 10 pieces are moved out of the category and 10 moved in. The number of total pieces remains the same so you retain the turnover of the category. The specific pieces change a little at a time. That means you are giving pieces a little rest and playing something else.

Click on the Analyze button to get details. The information about how long it will take a piece to go out and come back is important to understanding how long the piece will rest.

Keep making adjustments to the Schedule or number of pieces until you get the amount of desired rest.

One of my favorite examples of this is to use the Filter option in Auto Platoon.

Vivaldi wrote about 500 concertos. Does every one need to be in active rotation? For the sake of argument, let’s say you have recordings of 100 of these concertos. At any given time, you could have 10 in active rotation and 90 resting. Using the Auto Platoon Filter option, you can specify that you want to move pieces that match the criteria of Composer equals Vivaldi and Title contains Concerto. You might move one or two a week. You’ll continue to have the same saturation of Vivaldi concertos in your active library, 10, but at any given time, the specific 10 will change. That means your core will understand you are playing more of his canon while your likers will simply enjoy another Vivaldi Concerto. Win. Win.

You might do this for several composers to continually refresh which specific titles are playing.

Once you have your Auto Platoon settings in place, the action will be performed when you automatically schedule your log.

One more caution: If you add or subtract music from either Auto Platoon category, revisit the settings to make sure they are still working as you’d like.

If you program a format other than classical, you now know why I wanted you to read on. You also have music in your library that just missed the tested cut or maybe you have older work that still fits the format. You can use Auto Platoon to move these songs in and out of rotation the same way to give you audience the “Oh, wow, I haven’t heard that song in a long time” experience.

Should you need any assistance in setting this up, contact your MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant.

MusicMaster 8.0.5 is now available in Help, Check for Updates.

With this release the internal web browser has been updated from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Edge. Previously you might have encountered websites that no longer worked with Internet Explorer. With Microsoft Edge, the latest publishing standards are met making pages display better. There are added benefits including improved rendering performance, the ability to save user credentials for the Music Store (better cookie handling) and the ability to redirect the default download folder for Store audio file downloads.

We’ve updated the Chart Editor to better handle songs that re-enter the chart. Previously if a song was removed then added again, fields were cleared. Now as long as the Peak Position is more than zero, the song will be treated as re-entering the chart. This means fields like Debut Date and various Peak fields will not change unless the re-entry is higher than the current values.

Due to the possible installation of Microsoft Edge, the installation file will check to see if your system needs this installed. If it does, an additional messaging screen will appear to indicate this. Please note that if this needs to be installed, the process will take significantly longer than you might be used to. Once this is installed, subsequent installations will be back to a normal length.

Recombinant Scheduling for Priority Categories

By Laurie Knapp

With every major version release, we aim to introduce an innovative Scheduling method that works under the hood to give better results. In Version 8, there is a new mode called Recombinant Scheduling. It appears as an option in the Search Depth window (Schedule Properties).

This is a special function that was designed for fast rotation priority categories (search depth of 1) and for stations that struggle to separate multiple songs by the same contributing artists that are in high rotation.

This situation creates difficulties in passing artist separation rules because the songs in your priority categories can only play in the schedule order defined for their category. By the nature of how songs and categories rotate at different speeds against each other, sometimes you end up with artist conflicts and rule violations or Unscheduled Positions that you have to fill and juggle manually.

Recombinant Scheduling allows MusicMaster to juggle these songs around for you within the positions available for that category in the same hour to find the best combination that violates the fewest rules. This not only saves you time trying to make those changes manually, but is more likely to find the least rule violating pattern.

It’s important to note that while the Scheduler is of course looking backwards across hours to find artist conflicts, the shuffling itself only happens within the hour. That way, Hour Rotation for those songs are not impacted, as they will still play within the intended hour, just in a different position or quarter hour.

To use Recombinant Scheduling mode on a category, go to Dataset > Schedule > Schedule Properties and select it as an option from the Search Depth drop down. Note that if you want to use Recombinant Scheduling in some dayparts and not others, you can use the Levels feature. This allows you to assign a certain selection of search depth settings to a specific daypart, stored as a Level.

Recombinant Scheduling and Rules

Your rule settings are up to you, and either Breakable or Unbreakable rules will still work in conjunction with Recombinant Scheduling. As always, you can adjust your rule settings until you get the results you desire and use MusicMaster’s various analysis tools to look at the recommended separation values for each category.

Your choices also depend on what you’re looking to accomplish. Previously, you may have excluded your priority categories from any kind of rules because you wanted to play those songs in order and let everything else schedule around them.

When you have multiple priority categories, or artists appearing on multiple records within your priority categories, you may need to have rules to keep those artists from playing too closely together. Depending on your preferences, you can choose to use either Unbreakable or Breakable rules.

If you use Unbreakable rules, Recombinant Scheduling will do its best to shuffle the songs around within the hour so there are no artist conflicts that violate the rules. But if this is impossible given your separation settings, it will relax the Unbreakable rules just enough to make something work. This is how you might act when manually editing the log. If you find your rule settings are too restrictive, you might also consider relaxing them.

If you use Breakable rules, Recombinant Scheduling will also do its best to shuffle songs around the hour in such a way that all your breakable rules are met. As you’d expect, though, it will break the rules if it must. The good news is, because of Recombinant Scheduling’s unique shuffling ability, the Scheduler will have more options to pass your breakable rules and you’ll end up with far less rule violations than had you just plotted all your songs in schedule order.

Example Use

Let’s walk through an example of how Recombinant Scheduling helps schedule two priority categories with overlapping artists (Categories A and B). Here are the rule settings I chose:

I’ve chosen to set Unbreakable rules on both those categories. I want my primary artists to be separated by 35 minutes. However, it’s less important to me that there be a large separation between contributing artists. To avoid them playing back-to-back, I’ve just added a 6-minute separation to the All Keywords field, which contains all my primary and contributing artists.

You can see the result of Recombinant Scheduling in the following log. Here, the original schedule order is marked for illustration purposes using the numbers in the Q column, as well as within the song title.

(To create your own schedule order field like this, you can add a text field in Dataset > Library > Fields. Then sort your category by schedule order by right-clicking on the upper left corner of the grid, or referencing Schedule > Schedule Order. You can then fill in numbers in order from top to bottom.)

Categories H and C are priority categories that only play once an hour, so I didn’t need to use Recombinant Scheduling with them. Instead, they were scheduled in order during the first Scheduling Pass. I then scheduled A and B around them using the Recombinant Scheduling mode.

In the image below, you can see that the blue highlighted songs by DJ Khaled would have been in conflict if they’d scheduled in order at 1:44am and 2:11am (less than 35 min apart). So, MusicMaster instead swapped the third song in the stack (“MASK OFF”) up to that second position at 2:11am, and saved Song 2 (“Shining”) for the next position where it had no conflict.

For another example, we can see how Recombinant Scheduling improved the separation between my secondary artists.

As you can see, the changes need not be dramatic. For the most part, MusicMaster will schedule your songs in their original order, and only make the swaps necessary to resolve conflicts so you don’t have to worry about them.

If you’re scheduling a current or tight rotating format, we encourage you to give Recombinant Scheduling a try. You may also want to try out different rule settings and check out the results to see what works best for you.

If you have any questions, talk to your MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant.

Database Security and User Rights

By Brian Wheeler

Your MusicMaster database is your station’s ‘secret sauce’. It’s what makes your radio station(s) unique. It makes sense to protect the secret sauce from prying eyes, right? Setting up security for your database is an easy process.

To set up your security system, go to Tools, Options. Under Dataset Security, you’ll see Users and Rights. We’ll start there.

Here is where you establish usernames, passwords, and permissions. You can enable and disable certain functions for users so they are not burdened with areas of the program that are not within their individual roles. Select “Create User” to proceed with creating a username and password for your auxiliary users.

Once you’ve created a new user, you can assign a username and password. From that point, you can give them access to as much or as little of the software as you wish by checking the areas to which they require access.

Finally, when all users have been created and assigned, you can enable the security here.

Select the Enable Security button and your security system is ready to go. The next time you open MusicMaster, a username and password will be required to access the database.

The benefits to securing your database should be obvious, but there are additional benefits of which you may not be aware. Did you know that if you’ve enabled our security feature, you can also determine who has made changes in the schedule editor? It’s true!

Open the Schedule Editor and select the Modify Editor Layout icon. In the screen that appears, find the list of fields in the left side of the screen and look for Schedule: Last Change and Schedule: Changed By. Bring these two fields into the Selected Fields list in the middle of the screen by dragging and dropping them or using the single arrow icon pointing to the right. Drag and drop these fields to position them in the layout in the order you desire. Hit OK and choose the Save Editor Layout icon to save the layout.

Now, when a song is changed in the log or an unscheduled position is filled two pieces of information will display in these fields. Schedule: Last Changed will display the date and time of the change and Schedule: Changed By will record the profile used when the change was made.

If you have any questions about setting up Database Security, reach out to your Music Scheduling Consultant and we’ll be happy to help.

It has come to our attention that the most recent release of ESET Internet Security (Version 15.1.12.0) can inadvertently cause MusicMaster Pro to terminate during the license check. This will result in an abrupt software failure.

If you have recently upgraded your ESET product and are having this problem, please contact your MusicMaster support rep for assistance. We are working with ESET to find a permanent solution to this incompatibility and will update this notice as new information becomes available.

Update: It appears that once the ESET protection is updated to May 10, 2022 or later, this problem no longer occurs.

Pro 8 Audio Editor

By Dave Tyler

You have asked for it. Heck I have asked for it and it is finally here in MusicMaster Pro Version 8: The Audio File Editor! If you already have your song cards in MusicMaster linked to your audio files then you are ready to go. If not then check out this article on how to set that up: https://musicmaster.com/?p=3486.

The Audio Editor allows you to accomplish some basic but important functions for your audio including Normalizing audio, trimming silence and even setting the runtime for playback in MusicMaster. As long as you do not already have an external audio editor set up, you will see the new Audio File Editor by default with SHIFT-F12.

Let’s look at of the available options. To get started open a category and right click on the song and choose Audio/Edit Audio File or SHIFT-F12.

Now let’s start by trimming the silence. This is a great feature because it allows you trim silence based on a “Silence Threshold” of your choosing from the front of the audio, end of the audio or both sides. Simply click the Trim Silence button, adjust your settings and click OK!

You may have noticed if you scoped an hour of music or just let an hour play in MusicMaster that sometimes a song will end and there will be a long perceived silence before the next song plays. This could be because there is a lot of extra silence at the end of the sound or maybe, like The Beatles, “A Day In The Life” the song has a very long fade. With Auto Runtime, based on your settings for “Silence Threshold”, you can have MusicMaster automatically determine where the song should segue into the next element. When you save this, it also updates the runtime on the MusicMaster song card automatically.

And finally, “Normalize” I love this. As you know the recording industry has changed and every file is compressed pretty heavily nowadays. If your library includes songs from multiple decades then you might find a vast difference between the levels of a 70’s tune and a 2010 song. Normalizing your audio will help get these closer together to each for a consistent listening experience. While in the past this might have been difficult, MusicMaster makes i SO easy to do. Click Normalize, adjust your settings and click OK. We’ve even included a DC Offset Removal feature that will help center your audio if it is found to be off at all.

One more important note: Since you are editing the actual file used on the air, a new Permission has been added to Tools, Options, Database Security. The Tools, Audio Editor permission will allow you to give or remove access to this feature. Remember you will also need to Enable Security on the Dataset Security option to complete this process.

MusicMaster Pro version 8 is available now and a leap for Music Schedulers. This is just one new feature that can be found in this groundbreaking version of the World’s #1 Music Scheduling software.

Phantom Burn and Familiarity

By Joseph Knapp, Founder, MusicMaster Inc.

Shortly after streaming music services made it possible for radio listeners to hear their favorite songs on demand, the landscape of radio changed dramatically. Now your audience can hear any song at any time, create their own playlists and share their playlists with their friends. Most of these services now suggest similar music, leading people to discover new music they’ve never heard before and often music that your station is not playing.

Once upon a time, listeners had far fewer opportunities to discover new music. The biggest influence was radio. Top 40 radio introduced new songs to the audience. Tight rotations made your audience familiar with the new songs. It didn’t take long for them to decide if they liked a new song. After a certain number of spins, the audience would grow tired of hearing the song.

Before music research became popular, it was nearly impossible to determine if a new song was widely liked, or disliked, by your target audience. It was also difficult to determine when a new song had been played often enough for your target audience to grow tired of hearing it. Research made it possible to dump the ‘stiffs’ quickly and move the hits to a slower rotation category at just the right time.

Now that radio no longer controls new music discovery and the exposure of hit music to the audience, music research has become even more important. New songs added to your rotation can burn a lot faster than before, due to additional listening opportunities from outside sources. You may also be missing out on new music that is quickly becoming a favorite of your listeners.

Watching what other stations are doing using media monitoring services can give you some guidance, but it can also lead you to false assumptions. Your market and your audience may have different musical tastes and repeat airplay tolerances. If being local is important to you, your music rotation choices should also be based on local trends.

Is it possible that many formerly local radio stations failed to maintain the audience revenue necessary to support the local programming talent and entertainers necessary to remain profitable and compromised playing a national satellite or syndicated provider instead? Perhaps the cure was worse than the disease for these stations. Bottom line revenue cuts are rarely as profitable as top line revenue gains.

I offer these observations simply as food for thought, but I’m always happy to ‘talk radio’ with anyone!

F9 and Finding an Old Favorite

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

Cooking has undergone a renaissance where adding spices from different cultures or just in different combinations can make all the difference. Perhaps you’ve done some experimenting in the kitchen where you try a new twist on your favorite dishes.

Would you ever consider doing something like that with your MusicMaster data? Would you like to add a little spice to your playlists? Let’s see if you’re ready.

Does this describe you:

You press F9, look through the same list of songs when you have to fill an unscheduled position or just need to do something different. You regret to admit you’re a little bored picking the same songs all the time.

You have lots of music in your library that you don’t play on a regular basis, the proverbial Hold category or category with the songs that came in after the cutoff of your music test.

If either of these fits you, here’s a simple thing you can do to change things up. Go to Tools, Options, Schedule Editor Options and open Replacement Song Options.

The Search Mode will default to F9. The Default Category List will default to Use category of currently scheduled song or element. Change that to Specific Category List. Now pick those categories that have songs that could play and still meet all your programming goals. Okay and close the screen.

In the Editor, where F9 previously would have given you the songs from the original category, now you’ll get the new list you selected. What this ultimately means is that every time you have to fill a position or you want to make a change, you’ll be picking songs that don’t routinely schedule. These songs still fit your format and programming goals. You’ve just given your audience an “oh wow” moment. That’s a win no matter how you look at it.

Should you want the original category, you can always use the binocular icon to change the category list. This change simply brings these perhaps forgotten songs back to your attention to get a little love.

One more thing: When you open Replacement Song Options, there is a drop down there. You’ll find other replacement options listed where you can also configure the settings.

There is so much music that works in your format that doesn’t get regularly played. This is just one way to make it easier to add that spice into your playlist. Cook up a playlist that has your audience craving more.

Should you have any questions or need assistance setting this up, reach out to your Music Scheduling Consultant.

Category Fallback Options
by Paul Ziino

You are editing your log. You double-click on an unscheduled position to look for replacement options but there are none available—all songs in that category violate your unbreakable rules. Now what do you do? You probably click the query icon and change the category to look through. Well, what if that category’s songs all violate unbreakable rules? You have to go through that process all over again.

In Version 8 we have introduced a new feature called Category Fallback Options. This allows you to preset the categories you’ll allow the replacement song window to look in when the original category’s songs don’t pass the unbreakable rules.

Go to Tools/Options, then under Schedule Editor Options select Category Fallback Options. Here you’ll see the list of your categories. Each category allows you to enter a sequence of other categories to look in.

In my example above, if the replacement can’t find an A that passes the unbreakable rules, it’ll go next to category 90. If no 90 passes the unbreakable it’ll fallback to category 80, and if still no song works it’ll fallback to category 70. No longer will we need to re-query in the replacement window, MusicMaster will do it for you!

Notice you can check the box to do this for Replacements (F9) as well as Quick Replacements (Shift-F9).

To get version 8.0 go to Help/Check for Updates and follow the prompts. If your MusicMaster subscription allows for updates, you’ll be able to retrieve the installer right there. Keep in mind, upgrading to version 8.0 does require an automatic database upgrade, so you’ll want to make sure to backup your data first, and verify that all MusicMaster installations are eligible for upgrade before proceeding. We suggest you work with your IT folks to do any upgrades to your software.

No Fooling around today: MusicMaster PRO 8.0.2 is available to you under Help, Check for Update. Changes include:

Adding better visibility to fields you’ve set to use in the Search Bar. When you open Fields, the default search bar fields will show checks when you have made no other changes to the search fields.

Changes have been made to improve the reliability of copy and paste functionality in Library Maintenance

The ability to sort by Song Rest in the Schedule Editor replacement window wasn’t working when you clicked on the column header. Thanks to the eagle-eyed users who spotted that.

Adjustments have been made to the SACEM DIP43 report to address new standards. The BMI/ASCAP Report has also been adjusted to use the Community Upload format.

You can find the full list of changes under Help, Release notes. Contact your MusicMaster Scheduling Consultant with any questions.