The Mini Scheduler would be nearly perfect if it also allowed the following types of items to be added to a template (in addition to ‘folders’/categories):
—specific individual items (audio files)
—an Artist (for e.g. a ‘Madonna weekend’)
—a Year (or better still, a DECADE like 1960s)
—a BREAK item
—a DUMMY item
—a COMMAND item
—an Action item (or Action List?)
The hour template entry dialog could then be changed to look like the Playlist tab, with the tree and item panes at the botom of the screen. The ‘special’ items like BREAK, DUMMY, COMMAND, Action, etc. could then all be grouped under a new node named Special Items, which would be shown ONLY in that tree and the tree in the Playlist tab pane (but NOT in the Library tab tree).
Actually, I’m planning to introduce a second level of scheduling in a later version which would work like this:
There’s not only a single “playlist” for each hour but many of them: One for the music log, one for the jingles to be played, one for the ads etc. All of these “content lists” can be managed independently from each other, or generated randomly with the Mini Scheduler or any external tool.
Then, you have som sort of “grid” or “hour template” which defines the abstract structure of an hour. Each element of this grid is either a reference to a particular item from the library, a special item like an automation break etc., or a placeholder which refers to one of the above mentioned “content lists”:
Show opener (fixed item)
Music (reference to “music” content)
Music (reference to “music” content)
Jingle (reference to “jingles” content)
Music (reference to “music” content)
Break (special item)
etc.
There can be more than one “grid”, and you can specify which grid to use for which weekday/hour, just like the template assigments in the current versions.
Then, finally, there’s a component which turns the abstract grid and the content lists for that hour into the final schedule/log, replacing the abstract references in the grid with the items from the content lists.
