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Scheduling Rules – Basic Settings

The basic music flow and hourly content rules are those for Tempo, Gender, Sound Code and Artist Separation. The Hour Restrictions rule is the one that is required when a station is dayparting songs; preventing the from scheduling in certain hours. On the Rules Enforcement screen, you select the Rules that you want to use.  There’s no need to enforce any that you do not use. The screenshot below shows my own settings. These are sufficient for most stations

There are other optional characteristics that can be applied to Songs such as Texture and Mood. Those two are rarely used, but some stations use one of them in place of Tempo.  If you are one of the 98.5% of stations that don’t use Key Transitions, don’t enable the rule.

Announcers: Enforce this only if you have named Announcers and applied characteristics to the Announcer.

Same Day Repeat: This rule grew out of the “no repeat work-day” station positioning trend that grew in popularity in the 80s and 90s.  This one is only active within clocks that are designated for the purpose.

Same Artist Previous Day: Some music directors like it. Myself, I think it a bit much.  To me, it is of little concern if a song by a popular artist scheduled on Monday around 9am and a different song by that artist happens to schedule Tuesday at 8:45.  The parameters are set on the Category rules screen.

Title Separation: This rule is needed at Christmas or by stations that play a lot of different recordings of the same song. The rule works across categories, not within them. That means if you have two versions of “White Christmas” , one in your Christmas A category and the other in your Christmas B category, MusicONE allows you to set the amount of time they must be separated.  However, if both versions of the song are in the same category, the separation rule is not observed. In these cases, multiple version of the same one in the category,  it is important to have them separated appropriately in the Rank order of the category.

Product Separation:  Is like Artist Separation for non-music units.  A station may run a lot of PSA’s and some of them could be about fund-raising activities. It could create a Product named Fund Raising, then tell M1 to not schedule such announcements close together.

Album Separation and DMCA Rules: These are part of the very stupid American streaming laws that apply to internet-only radio stations.  If that’s you, you should know about them and if you click those boxes, M1 will enforce them.

Scheduling Mode:  MusicONE was designed to work in the manual mode; editing during the schedule build.  If Automatic is selected, M1 will run the entire day without stopping.  It will, however, usually have to break some formatting rules in order to do that.

Auto Jump: This is very handy as it allows M1 to jump ahead to the ‘next’ slots of the category when it needs to. Example: The station has formatted Power Gold four times an hour and the ‘dig’ level is 5, so M1 has five choices each time it schedules a Power Gold.  If M1 finds the slot at 10:10 can’t be filled with one of the currently available five, it will jump to 10:20 to place one of them in that slot if it can. If so, a ‘new’ one moves into the dig level, M1 goes back to 10:10 to see if that one fits without a violation.  If not, it jumps to the Power Gold slot at 10:40, fills with one of the five, then goes back to 10:10 to see if another song that moved into available selections list will fit. In my example below, M1 is allowed to consider four slots (the current one plus 3) for each song as it schedules.  If it can’t fill the current slot or any of the next three without rule violations, it stops for you to edit as normal.

You can set it as high as 9, but experience has shown 3 is the best setting for most stations.

AutoSearch, Use Alternative Categories, Ignore Underplayed and Ignore Overplayed are for fully automatic scheduling with more complex actions and filling category slots with songs from other categories when required.  Used improperly, they can produce some erratic spins and rotations. You should not enable any of these without discussing it with us at the M1 office. 

Here are the Rule Enforcement settings that I use:

 

When you change a rule setting, always click the Save As Default button.  If you click only the OK button, the rule change is applied to the current schedule only.

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