M1 stops the scheduling run if it comes to a slot where all it’s choices at that moment would all violate one of your formatting rules. This seems odd to people at first, but it is operating precisely according to design, it is supposed to happen this way. As the computer geeks often say, “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” It is the reason M1 delivers the most consistent song rotations of all music schedulers, never over-playing some songs and under-playing others.
You could tell M1 to schedule the entire day without stopping. Open the Rules>Enforcement menu and remove checks from any one, or from all of the Rules boxes. This gets M1 to ‘ignore’ or over-ride the rule for this scheduling session. Do that and it’ll finish the entire day, fill in every slot in about 30 seconds. It’ll then display in red font every song that was scheduled that violates one or more of your formatting rules. You can click through the hours, find the violations and then decide if you want to accept that song in that position, or if you want to replace it or move it around to some other slot.
That’s the way all the other music schedulers work…they schedule the full day, then you do the editing. Either way, some personal editing is going to be required if you are going to get the very best music flow. So, the question is: do you edit after the schedule is all filled in or do you edit during the scheduling session? It is proven over and over that editing the M1 way, making the choices and fixes as you build the schedule is the much more efficient way to get the job done. M1 users average getting the daily schedule finished about 75% quicker than the guys using first-generation music schedulers.
So, each slot has to be filled. M1 comes to one where all the choices it has at the moment would violate a rule. You can click one of the songs into the slot, making a choice as to which rule to violate if you want. But the best thing to do is to click ahead to the next slot(s) of the same category. When you click on the next slot all the same songs will appear and maybe one of them won’t violate a rule in that slot; if in “passes”, drop it in. Then, maybe go to another slot of the same category and again drop one of the songs into that slot. As you do this, new songs will move up into the selections list and one of those will probably fit into the slot where M1 first stopped without violating a rule. So, after you’ve filled some of the upcoming slots, then click the scheduling arrow…M1 will go back to the slot where it first stopped and fill it. If you’ve filled some of the upcoming slots of the category and M1 still can’t fill the slot, none of the new arrivals at the top of the stack will fit, it will again stop there. So, jump ahead to upcoming hours and fill more upcoming slots of the same category. Eventually one will come to the top of the stack that will fit that original stopping place. This can all be done very quickly once you get the hang of it.
Also, sometimes M1 will stop and you’ll see only a very few songs in the ‘available’ selections list down below the clock; maybe as few as one-to-three. When that happens, it means that you are at the BOTTOM of the card stack for that category. Everything, every other song in the category has been scheduled in this-current-pass thru the category. M1 is designed to schedule every song in the category before re-scheduling any single song in the category. So when it gets to the bottom of the stack, the number of available selections gets smaller and smaller. When that final song in the stack/category has been scheduled, it then jumps back to the top of that list and, bingo, all sorts of songs are then presented for scheduling. (most of the time, you never seen the “shrinking number of choices”. you only see it when the last few songs in the category all violate a rule in one of your formatting slots and M1 has to stop so you can do a personal edit/choice.)
