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Reconcile – Why I Don’t

The question comes to me a few times a year, “How do i reconcile.”  What is that?  A reconcile removes from M1’s history any thing it scheduled that didn’t get played. Most stations over-schedule a song, or maybe two each hour because the music director doesn’t know the total amount of commercial content each hour of the day. The extra song(s) are there in case some of the hours have a light commercial load. That can be avoided if the traffic/advert schedule is imported into M1 each schedule, in which case the total amount of all content scheduled each hour shows and songs can be added, dropped or moved as needed before the final schedule save.

Music 1 has a reconcile function for some, not all of the world’s automation/playout systems. It reads the automation’s as-played history and removes the “played” flag on the song card in M1. But, I wouldn’t do reconciliation on anything except a commercial schedule where it is super important to get the scheduled ad on the air and if not, to run a make-good for it. The reason I don’t worry about music reconciles is it can result in some inconsistent song placement in the future. When that ‘played’ marker is removed, the song goes to the top of the card stack of its category where it will be when the next schedule is run. The chances are high that all reconciled songs will drop into the overnight hours of that next schedule you run.

So, if the song was scheduled in the noon hour on a Monday, but dropped and now on Tuesday I run the reconcile before scheduling Wednesday. That song will be at the top of the category stack and will schedule in the overnight hours.  Yes, I might add a daypart rotation rule that could prevent the overnight play and force it to schedule in another Mid-day hour on Wednesday. But then, once we start adding more and more exotic rules we risk getting an abundance of edit-stops, taking more work time for only arguable benefit. I mean, I’m a maven for song rotation control, but everything’s going to play again soon anyway, right?

 

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