A lot of artists are using more difficult names nowadays for the same projects. I noticed that the format scheduler can not recognize everything the way it should be in the artist field. The other day it was playing both “Miley Cyrus” and “Miley Cyrus featuring Dua Lipa” right next after each other. What is the solution to this? Besides using the schedule rules in the configuration. In terms of, what is the behavior of the scheduler in artists names (can you use & or + or featuring or comma’s)?
Hello and welcome to the mAirList community & support forum.
Would you please be so kind to enter your serial number of mAirList in the forum profile?
Thank you.
Done that. Hopefully will get some normal answers here. Thanks.
Thank you.
It’s not our normal procedure, but something was irritating at a first glance. So I asked this first.
I just wanted to be sure; yesterday I checked your name and was wondering “a new thread in mAirList v5.x from a user which is new to this forum?”.
Now I know: It’s concerning version 4.x, and you used the v5.x section of the forum because v4.x has been moved to the archive. Here’s why:
However, there is an answer to your question, but I don’t know if it works in your v4.x. So I don’t want to give you a wrong information; officially we refer to v5.x or, better, v6.x.
Thank you.
Please, let’s keep it professional (irritating at first glance ;-)). I am exploring if an investment in v6 is worth it since we (our company) spent thousand of euro’s on mAirlist during the years. We use mAirlist in a professional way and v4 is working properly so any update will influence the whole chain. Technical it is great software, but the scheduler does not work in a correct way (never did by the way). Feel free to share to answer so I can read about if worth the investment or switch to another alternative. In the meantime I will search the old database of answers. Thanks in advance.
When you say “it never did” - what’s your complaint?
Generally, the Mini Scheduler (hence the name) is not considered a 1:1 replacement for dedicated scheduling software like MusicMaster. But rather a good, free option if you can’t or don’t want to afford MusicMaster. And if you switch over to MM or another 3rd party scheduler at some point, we have good working interfaces to them.
Regarding your original question: The Mini Scheduler will automatically split artists by some common delimiters like “feat.”, “&” etc.
And for non-trivial cases (“John Lennon” and “The Beatles”), you can manually define “artist groups” in the scheduler configuration; any artist in a particular group is considered the same artist.
I’m not sure when this feature was introduced in the first place, if the old v4 have it already. But in the current 6.x, it is present, and it works as expected.
Hi Torben, it is not a complaint. I am trying to understand the algorithm of the system. And I do agree working with scheduler software might be the solution. But we are trying to run the system automated only to check it once a week (besides solving technical issues). I do think the format scheduler works fine but has some curious behavior. I noticed the same artist in the last played option slowly glues toward each other.
For example, a certain artist “X” was imported on several days spread during a week or even month. After a month or so the last played info is slowly moving towards the same dates. After a few months it will play all artist “X” songs in a row, and it looks like everything was imported at the same time. It also bring artist with more titles more upfront to your format, sounds logical (having 10 sings of artist X and only 2 of artist Y), but it does not feel right for some reason.
If you start a radio station from scratch you are importing your database all at once. This will result in the fact that everything is ordered in alphabetical order. Therefor the question, is there an option to hustle the import date so you can trick the system/algorithm not the play everything in a row.
Hopefully you understand the question. We are trying to serve the listener the best listeners experience. And I am just curious what improvement is made in v6 before investing (v4 works fine for us, although no support).
Thanks, Eelco
The current 6.x versions have a “debug log” feature in the scheduler which will tell you exactly which song was selected, and why it was preferred over the other available songs. The log is usually huge, but once you understand how it is to be read, it is very helpful when tracking down scheduling artifacts.
The scheduler does not use any alphabetical order etc. of the songs. The main sorting key is the hour that it was last played, but within these groups, a lot of randomization is taking place. Again, if you see suspicious things, the debug log file will help to figure out why it happened (and also help us to fix possible bugs).
An artist-based scheduling approach (first select artist, then pick song by this artist) has been proposed before; I will keep it in mind.
But again, we’re not going to be a MusicMaster replacement. These guys have 30+ years experience in scheduling algorithms. The Mini Scheduler algorithm is far less sophisticated.
Thank you for your open answers. Appreciated and helpful! I am already checking for the upgrade. All the best from The Netherlands.