Automated Tasks: "Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)"
By Dave Tyler
In the current age of broadcasting, the idea of being just a Production Director or Music Director or any other position in a station simply doesn’t exist. All employees, no matter what level, are expected to wear multiple hats and shoulder a variety of responsibilities. As the leader in music scheduling, MusicMaster understands that any time we can save you something as small as a mouse click will save you time and allow you to better manage your workload.
MusicMaster CS is a robust platform that streamlines so many of our daily tasks. CS can manage hundreds of stations and/or formats, thousands of songs, and so much more, all from one place. CS allows top-level users to manage this and assign user roles at the station level.
As someone who has programmed multiple stations and formats at the same time, I know it can be daunting to get everything done. With fewer staff members in stations these days, we do not always have the luxury of delegating. The plates that we have spinning are our plates, so time management quickly becomes a prime concern.
What is priority number one? We can say making money, and that is true to a degree. I mean, we need to keep the doors open. But at the end of the day we need to have our product, our programming on the air. There must be something to view or listen to, and therefore something to sell.
You can imagine that a market programmer, regional programmer, or national programmer needs an efficient workflow that can accomplish intriguing programming across potentially dozens to hundreds of stations. You may think this is more than one person can do. Well… it was.
MusicMaster CS has a feature that we as programmers have been wanting since the birth of music scheduling software. The ability to have the program automatically schedule music logs! What??? Yep, it is a reality now. MusicMaster CS has a mega feature called Automated Tasks!
- Which Automated Tasks are currently available? Let me tell you:
- Category Sync
- Create Database backup
- Create Station backup
- Export to Automation
- Export Special History Report
- Library Sync
- Nexus Publish Meta Data
- Publish Changed Hours
- Purge History
- Reconcile Schedule
- Send Queued Notifications
- Station Distribution
Impressive right? And you can set it up to have these tasks happen while you’re sleeping or on vacation or as part of the weekly routine to give you more time to give attention to your other responsibilities.
Today, we are going to focus on the all-important “Having something on the air” thing. Let’s set up an automated task for scheduling music. Enterprise is the mothership of CS. It is the main control room for all the data for the various stations/formats etc. From here, we will set up (or add) an Automated Task.
Once I click Add New Automated Task, I will see a box that allows me to set up which feature I want (Start Automatic Scheduler). I make music changes on Tuesday and run the task Tuesday night at 8p for (Thursday-Wed) and that gives me Wednesday to edit/massage my logs before exporting them to automation to begin on Thursday. I then click on Details to set up which station(s) I want this to apply to.
I have selected two stations: Dave and Smooth Jazz and I have selected to schedule out for 7 days which is 168 hours. (Through next Wednesday)
When I select the station(s) I want, the configuration box will immediately open. If you have used MusicMaster Pro in the past, this box will look familiar. You can set which categories are to be scheduled, the options you desire, and any filters you may need for the scheduling session.
Once done here, click OK and then OK again on the Stations screen. Then, hit Save on the “Add Automated Task” screen and guess what? It’s done. Your music will schedule automatically week after week, even if you’re sipping an umbrella drink by a pool somewhere!
Now I know what you’re thinking: that’s great that it’s scheduled, but now the logs are just sitting there. As mentioned, I can manually export those logs on Wednesday to automation, or… and this process will be another blog… but you can also use Automated Tasks to set up an automatic “Export to Automation” task! I can hear the “Whoa, that’s cool!” and high-fives from my desk right now.
Automated Tasks is a feature that schedulers like us have wanted for many years, and it is here. This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the sheer power and rich features of MusicMaster CS. As always if you have any questions, you can always reach out to your MusicMaster rep for answers.