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Artist Separation Problem Investigation

I'm getting all kinds of stops for Artist separation problems.  M1 didn't use to stop so much during scheduling.  Now, its taking me fifteen or twenty minutes to schedule and edit the log every day.

I got your library file and here's what I found:  You've got four songs by Dua Lipa in your three Currents categories and others by her in Recent Hits & Recurrent categories.  Your rotation formatting calls for this many Dua Lipa "plays" a day:

Category A....7 plays a day
Category B.... 5 plays a day
Category C.....4 plays a day
Category D.....2 plays a day
Category E.....1 play a day

If every Dua Lipa song were 4 minutes long, that would give you a total of 76 minutes of Dua Lipa "content" every day.

That gives you a total of 19 Dua Lipa spins a day.  If every Dua Lipa song were 4 minutes long and all 19 were scheduled, that would have Dua Lipa taking up 76 minutes of "content space" every day. This can't be done with the One Hour separation you've set on the artist. If Dua Lipa's first song were to schedule exactly at midnight and were 4 minutes long, then next possible slot to schedule a Dua Lipa would be sometime after 1:04.   Chances that it would schedule precisely at 1:04 are slim.   So, maybe it schedules at 1:15 and is 4 minutes.  Then the next one by Dua Lipa couldn't schedule until after 2:19.

M1 does its separation from the beginning and the end of each song. You have a Dua Lipa in your Hots, and the Hot category schedules first in the scheduling run. Now if the first Dua Lipa of the day was to schedule at 1 AM, then no other Dua Lipa could later schedule in the Midnight hour, because the "end" of the song, even if it were to schedule at exactly midnight, would be less than an hour away from the "start" of the Dua Lipa at 1am, so not Dua Lipa from your B or C category could be scheduled in the midnight hour.  And with the Dua Lipa "Hot" scheduled at 1am, then no other Dua Lipa could schedule until one hour AFTER that one is  over....sometime after 1:04.

Since Hots schedule first and your Hots each get 5 spins a day, that Dua Lipa song is dropped into the slots thru the day and each time it then closes a 2 hour "window"  (one hour before it and one hour after it).  Thus the Dua Lipa "Hot", claims over 10 hours of scheduling day real-estate before M1 even begins scheduling the second of your Categories.  It is more than 10 hours, actually because the length of each song is counted as M1 observes the separation time.

You may not want to handle it this way, but FYI: I changed your Dua Lipa artist separation rule to 30 minutes and ran a schedule with your database.  M1 stopped with just three problems. Two were also Dua Lipa artist separations, but I easily resolved those by clicking ahead to the next hour and manually dropping the Dua Lipa into a proper slot there.  And the other stop was a Female run rule.  I resolved that and the day was done, without violations and it took me less than 60 seconds.

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