Music Master 'Genius' Workshop - Chicago

Music Master ‘Genius’ Workshop 10/09 - Chicago

After spending a full day with the guys at Aware Software and taking in the Music Master ‘Genius’ workshop, I fully realize I’m nowhere near a ‘Genius’. I knew Music Master was powerful. I knew it could do some pretty impressive things but today I learned that it can almost do anything! This workshop further cemented in my mind that I’m using the best music scheduling software system on the planet and it helped me unlock more doors I was looking to go through to help me optimize the scheduler.

It was a jam packed session of info in not nearly enough time but I still took away so many ideas and helpful tips and tricks. Some of them I already can’t remember and some I’ll need to try a couple times to fully understand. I learned things that should be so obvious and keystrokes that make you say…’oh, you can do that’?! Or…’I didn’t know that icon did that’!

So, having said that, I thought I’d just share with you some features that may make you say ‘oh…you can do that?! Hopefully features that you find very helpful.

1. How do you manually schedule a song in the log editor in an unscheduled position? Maybe you want to manually add a certain song. You could type the entire song into the title field (like I’ve done for a few weeks) to enter a song manually. Or, type the first few words followed by .. For example – Who Wouldn’t Want.. for Keith Urban’s – Who Wouldn’t Want To Be Me. Or, you could type in ..dog to find songs that end in the word ‘dog’. Or, ..dog.. to find songs with ‘dog’ anywhere in the title. This makes it easy and quick to find songs that you might want.

2. Did you know that in version 4.12 when you have an unscheduled position you can press SHIFT F9 and it will find the next perfect song. However, if your database is set up so tight and there are just too many unbreakable rules it most likely will not schedule a song. But, if you quickly need to find a song in an unscheduled position, try SHIFT F9, and see if MMWin can find the right song.

3. Did you ever wish to highlight an artist in the log editor? Let’s say you are doing a Keith Urban weekend. You want to see all Keith Urban songs on the log in the log editor. Press Alt F7 in the log editor and choose ‘Mark matching songs’. Then from the drop down pick the ‘Artist’ field that contains ‘Keith Urban’. This will now highlight all your Keith Urban songs on that day. Not only that, if you want to advance your log to the next Keith Urban song press Shift F7, and you’ll quickly advance to the next highlighted position.

4. Maybe you’re playing in the log and you want to bookmark a certain hour to come back to later while you move forward to other hours. In the schedule editor, you can click on the bookmark icon, which is to the left of the hour selection bar (row of hours). Click on that to select a bookmark and then come back to that at anytime by clicking the bookmark icon again.

5. Want to find a complete quick listing of one artist? Select ‘Music Categories’ from the left stack of categories. There’s an icon to the right of the print icons. It’s the third magnify glass looking icon that says ‘Find matching values’. In the ‘Search’ window above this search for an artist. Let’s say ‘Brooks’. From there, you can click on Brooks and Dunn or Garth Brooks and click on the ‘Find matching values’ icon and it’ll bring up a nice clean list of all Brooks and Dunn or Garth Brooks songs.

6. Have you ever wanted to change your library to all upper case or from uppercase to upper and lower case? Maybe you inherited a database and it’s a mess. Well, with MMwin you can easily mass change all your title fields and artist fields and make them what you want. It’ll take seconds to do. While in the library management section just call up your ‘music categories’ right click on the title bar, artist and/or artist keyword and choose mass changer. From this drop down window you can choose change from last to first name or first to last name, all upper case, all lower case, mixed case and much more! It’ll take seconds and your entire library is done and now it looks the way you want it to!

7. Here’s something I still need to learn more about but I’ll still mention it because it’s just too cool! If you set up music master to look to where your music is stored (or have them stored to mp3 on your local computer) you can preview songs. You are able to preview the way two songs segue in the schedule editor while scheduling. You could preview possible scheduled songs and unscheduled positions to see if that song sounds good with the song already scheduled before it. You can also load the entire day and scope all segues that day while you work on something else. If you hear a bad segue due to tempo or coding you can stop it and reschedule that song. F12 starts the audio anywhere in the system and CTRL F12 stops it.

8. Here’s one I just love and can’t wait to do every other week. Keyword Separation Wizard. Go to Library, Keywords. Click on tools and then choose Separation Wizard. From here click next, and chose 70% (the rest is defaulted correctly) and press next. Once the wizard is done click on the filter icon to have it show you what kind of artist separation you can get away with on each artist. This wizard looks at your clock requests and the amount of songs by each artist and determines what you can and can’t get away with. This will help each artist not play too close to itself and not play too far apart creating a perfect and healthy balance!

There was so much more in this info packed day than I could possible share. If you want to take your experience with Music Master and the sound of your station to a new level, I recommend you book yourself for one of the next ‘Genius’ workshops.

Dallas - December 16th, Tampa - January 13th, Boston - March 19th, and Los Angeles - April 16th

Mark Patric