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Why would I want to merge the commercials into M1 when my automation system has its own merge function that does the same thing?

It’s good to import the spots into M1 because then you can see exactly how much content you have in each and every hour, eliminating the need to over-schedule every hour with a couple of extra songs that usually don’t get played but which are there only because you need to have ‘fill’ material in the short or light-commercial hours.
You already know the format clock pie-slices for songs adjust to the length of each song.  If you import spots, then the format clock segments for the commercial breaks will also adjust in size to the amount of content within them.  Two minutes worth of commercials gives a 2-minute pie-slice.  A four minute commercial break gets a 4-minute pie-slice.
If the hour is over-scheduled, M1 shows you the overflow (as additional pie-slices) on the left of the screen.  If the hour is under-scheduled, you get white-space at the end of the clock.  Also the total content is displayed numerically at the bottom of the scheduling window. So, with the spots and the music hour fully scheduled, you can click through the hours and clearly see where you need to drop or add content to get closer to a precise 60 minute hour.  You won’t have to keep scheduling so many songs that are never going to be played.
Another reason to import spots is that you can move the units around as you like.  If you can change the order of the spots within each break.  You can move spots from one break to another, too.
When you finish with the next day’s log, you can export a full-merged log to your digital system.  Or, you can export the log without the commercials and then let your automation system do the final merge as you’ve been doing in the past

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