Music Scheduling > Glossary

Library

The library contains all the audio files that are up for consideration.

Each item is described by a set of properties, some fields being mandatory while others are optional.

Categories

This is the main piece of information associated to an item in the library. This piece of information is required.

A category can be seen as a set of tracks that must have the same rate of exposure, on-Air.

Users can create as many categories as they want (on-the-fly creation/edition)

A common use of categories is to gather tracks by date of release.

Rules

The scheduling software allows you to apply a certain number of rules to the different items, in order to better control the flow, balance and mix of the scheduled playlists.

A rule is an option allowing you to define the way a category should be exposed, depending on its genre, tempo, type, hour restrictions…

Rule options are customizable and can be applied differently depending on the category or time slot users are considering (cf. Strategies)

Rules can be grouped together, depending on their settings (rotation rate, protection to make sure certain categories don’t play next to each other, weight associated with each category…)

Example: the « Titles Minimum Separation » rule has a « duration » criterion allowing you to keep the same category from playing too close to itself. This duration can vary depending on the category you are considering. On balance, a title from the « Top 40 » category will be schedulable every 3 hours, while you may want the system to give you more time of rest for a song from the Gold category.

Similarly, the minimum separation time can be set differently depending on the hour of the day (song rotation can be less important during the night than during the day).

Strategies

A strategy is a set of rules and parameters that need to be applied, taking into account the importance relative to each rule.

Rule selection, as well as Rule priorities, can vary inside one same strategy depending on the categories you’re dealing with. Consequently, there is a sub-association that is made between the rules and the categories when defining a strategy.

Calendar of Strategies

Different strategies can be used throughout the day or week.

Therefore, there is a calendar allowing you to choose which strategy must be applied for each hour of the day.

Scheduling

To generate a musical scheduling, the software will choose, for each target run in a clock, an item belonging to the category that has been called for.

The Music scheduling software performs searches, going from one category to the other, over the lapse of time the application has to cover.

A stack is created for each category.

For one specific run, the software goes through the category from top to bottom until it reaches a song that meets all the rules previously defined by users.

If no matching song has been found, the software will once again go through the list, ignoring the less important breakable rule. This operation will be repeated as often as needed. Nevertheless, if in the end, there is still no matching item, the position will remain unscheduled.

An item that has already been scheduled is sent back to a lesser position in the list, based on a refusal percentage (100% meaning the song is sent back to the bottom of the stack).

Once automatic scheduling is over, a report will provide users with information regarding the number of items that have been scheduled for each category, along with the number of positions that remain unscheduled for each category.

Pass order

This indicates the pass order for the category. The category listed as “1” will schedule first and so on. Furthermore, with a similar set of rules, the first categories suffer less restrictions and their rotation is naturally richer and really well-balanced.

Therefore, categories with fewer items are usually scheduled first. Categories not appearing in this list will never be scheduled, even if some target runs in the clocks call for these latter.

Turnover analysis

To improve scheduling schemes, it is important that the rules be coherent with the library content (if a rule applied to one category is too restrictive, this can prevent songs belonging to this category from being scheduled).

For this purpose, users have at their disposal an array of analysis tools to better deal with the composition of their library.

Scheduling log editing

One scheduling logs have been generated, users can browse through the playlists in order to edit them. Titles can be moved by simple drag-&-drop, or they can be deleted, and so on…

By hovering their mouse over the runs users wish to edit, the software will display the stack of items corresponding to the category that is called for (other option: the software can display the list of lesser-scheduled songs belonging to the category).

For each item in the stack, users can see how well the rules do apply or not, for the run that is being considered. What is more, a second list allows you to see in one glance which rules have been broken. Users can also select a title from another category. The same type information regarding the rules will be displayed.