Hi Alex, and welcome here 
First of all, the pronounciation would be “mair-list”, because the name is a pun on the German word “mehr” (pronounced as “mair”), which means “more” - when mAirList was created, the intention was to write a software that could do more than than our old software “Airlist” at eldoradio. Many people say “m-air-list” though, and it’s ok for me.
Regarding the hour templates, I first propose you upgrade to Version 3.1. It’s still in beta, but it’s very stable already, and it will be released for production in a couple of days. The scheduling functions have been improved a lot in that version.
When you create folders for your songs, think of them as “music categories” or “rotations”. For example, create some folders named “Rock”, “Jazz”, “Soul” etc. and place your songs into them accordingly. Alternatively, use a rotation-style approach and name the folders “hot rotation”, “medium rotation”, “basic rotation” etc. It’s all up to you.
In the hour template editor, add as many elements as you want songs in the final playlists. For each element, choose the folder from which the song is to be picked. For example, insert two elements from “hot rotation”, four from “medium rotation” and ten from “basic rotation”.
(The frequency in which a particular song is scheduled depends on (a) how often its folder is referenced in the templates and (b) the total number of songs in that folder. For example, when you have 16 songs in your “hot rotation” folder, and the folder is used twice in the template, each song will be played once in 8 hours on average.)
To make sure that you get a full hour of songs (which heavily depends on the duration of the individual songs), you should do some “over-planning”, that is, use slightly more template elements than necessary. One of the new features introduced in mAirList 3.x is the “optional” flag (double-click the table cell to toggle it). Elements marked as “optional” will be left out when the hour is already full without them.
By default, template items are “floating” (indicated by a green background color). All “floating” songs will be shuffled before the playlist is saved - this is useful if you only want to determine how many items should be picked from which folder, but not their exact position in the playlist. “Fixed” items remain at their exact position in the template. For example, if you want to start each hour with a “Rock” item, put it on the top of the template list and mark it as “fixed”.
You can also set item or attribute filters on an element, so the scheduler will only pick items that match the filter. Attribute filters can use variables for the current date and time, so you can e.g. place 24 top-of-the-hour jingles (with time announcement) into a special folder, tag them with the respective hour value, and let the scheduler pick the right one (“Hour=%h”).
If there’s anything unclear, feel free to ask. Cad is working on a manual - in the mean time, we’ll be happy to answer even the “RTFM” sort of questions 