MusicMaster Blog
Hearing Is Believing: Give Your Log A Listen Before You Send It posted on July 16th, 2018
By Dave Tyler
I am glad you are here and reading our blogs. All of our blogs are written our staff who are long time radio pros, your colleagues, and there are a ton of great ideas here.
As programmers, we all schedule our music and then “massage” it – or check it out to fill any unscheduled positions and just give it a good once over to make sure tomorrow’s music will sound the way it should. Some programmers just schedule and send the log, while others will take an hour or more to look over every transition. I will say this up front, MusicMaster gives you all of the tools you could possibly need to basically schedule, check for any unscheduled positions, and send a great log. If your database is built well from the category level up through your clocks, grids and into well thought-out coding and rules, then there should be very little left to do after hitting “Auto-Schedule”. With all of that said, the prideful Programmer still wants to make sure he/she is sending the best product. I would like to suggest a great way to “Listen” to your log!
Before being able to listen to your log you are going to need to link your song cards to the actual audio. This can be done via Audio File Settings in Tools/Options. One of my compadres here at MusicMaster wrote a terrific blog on how to set up your audio.
Once your Audio Files are setup, then you can open a scheduled log. In my example, I right click on Shannon Lawson, then select Audio, and I get a lot of different options as you can see below:
You may choose to play an entire song or play all remaining songs. One of my favorite tools here is to “Scope All Remaining Songs”. Using my example, if I were to choose this here, it would play the intro of Shannon’s song to the vocal then fade and play the end of the song followed by the TOH ID, and then the intro to Garth and so on. You could literally listen to your entire log in this “Scoped” fashion. There are several options for you to explore, but this is an innovative way to actually hear the flow and vibe of the day you scheduled.
There are so many cool tools for you to use in MusicMaster, so explore and find what works for you and if you need any help, any one of us on the Support team would be eager to help you.