Will there come a more detailed description of how to use the new music scheduler?
Is it so that hour templates have the priority and when there’s nothing scheduled in an hour template, the system then picks the music templates?
What’s the exact meaning of the 16 blocks?
Is it something like templates within templates?
Thanks!
Bart
I’m going to write a detailed tutorial, but I haven’t had the time to do so yet.
Some hints which will be helpful I guess:
First of all, if you’re not going to use the new music template feature, your old v4 hour templates will continue to work. So you can still use “Random item from folder” and all that.
What’s the idea behind the music templates? To put it simply: Separate hour/program planning (clocks) from music scheduling.
Say your typical hour/clock looks like this:
xx:00 news
xx:15 ad break #1
xx:30 local news
xx:45 ad break #2
And in between, there’s music. Actually four blocks of music: after the news, after ad break #1, after local news, after ad break #2
So in the hour template, you only place the fixed elements for the news and ad breaks (and assign fixed times to them), and for the gaps, you use the “Fill with music” item. It will look very similar to the screenshot I posted along with the v5 announcement, but there’s only two music blocks in that example:
The second step is to define a music template, say “Daytime music”. If you are going to use the Mini Scheduler to pick the music, set the template to “internal” mode, and then specify the folders to use for blocks 1, 2, 3 and 4. Those who use an external scheduler like Powergold or MusicMaster will set the template to “external” and specify the input filename instead.
The final step is to assign a music template to each day of the week and hour, just like you do with the hour templates. Note the second tab “Music” in the “Template hour assignments” dialog. So the scheduler knows which music template to use when he encounters one of the “Music” items in the hour template. You’re right, it’s a “template within a template” in a way.
And this is actually a very interesting point: You can combine the hour and music templates freely. For example, you can have different hour templates for your morning, noon, drivetime shows, but use the same “daytime” music template for all of them. And if you’re ever going to tune the music template a bit, you only do it in one place.
The other cool thing is that “Fill with music” will take care of the length of the respective blocks and pick exactly the required number of songs to fill the gap. No more overflows and underruns when you have a fixed time news or ad break in the middle of the hour templates! And the scheduler can also add jingles in between the songs, even based on particular attributes. (Imagine a folder with “slow to fast” transition jingles.)
I hope this helps to start exploring the new scheduler - feel free to ask questions if you have any.
Hi Torben,
Thank you very much for your more detailed description of the new scheduler.
I know how it works now 
Hi, I’m really enjoying using the new way to schedule in Mairlist 5. I am having a slight issue though. I have about 600 songs in one folder, 200 in the 2nd folder and 100 in the 3rd. In mairlist 4, the mini scheduler would pick and use all the tracks over a few day period.
At the moment it appears that the scheduler is only using half the songs in each folder, When I scroll through the database, only half the music has a scheduled next date/time. I’ve run the log for 7 days, so pretty much every song should be scheduled.
The result is we have a really high rotation at the moment, is there something I am doing wrong? I’ve tried using my old marilist 4 clock hours (random item from folder over and over again)… but the rotations are still off using this method.
Thank you in advance.
Sorry, I’m off to France for a while, not much opportunity to give extensive support right now…
The v5 scheduler as a new “generate debug log” feature (mind the checkbox in the Mini Scheduler dialog, lower left corner). This will create a text file with a little bit of information about the songs considered, their penalty score, …
If you can’t figure out yourself why some songs aren’t used at all, we can use that debug log to investigate the issue when I’m back.
Cheers Torben. I will have a fiddle and report back.
To update you.
I installed a trial license on a second machine and totally rebuilt my database of 700 songs and 6 music categories from scratch. I did not use any of my old set up/datebase files, absolutely brand new database.
I have just run the log for 7 days and again only around 25% of the music in each folder/category is getting scheduled. I thought it may have been a corrupt database on the old machine, but it appears not. I have the log with was generated by the mini scheduler, its 25mb, so can’t attach to this post. I’m not really sure what I am looking for in it.
My next move is to go back to version 4 and see if I still have the issue. Will let you know what happens.
This interests me because I’ve also spent a lot of time in categorising songs.
I know of certain scheduling systems that have a ‘search depth’ setting where the system search through a category for a certain depth (20% by example) but at least all songs in that category should have been scheduled before the scheduler starts from top of the list again.
Yes, I know, my English is bad, but I guess you know what I mean.
This should be fixed but beside that I have to admit that in this price range there’s no other software package on the market that has to offer this much functionality as mAirList does
I have already the same problem like my speakers befor.
I do 1 hour templates you can see at the Attachment.
And my Musicblock has followed settings you can see it on the picture. I have also only a few replayes songs but my Music library has over 20’000 songs.
i hope you can found fast the problem.
Thank you!
Turned out that the scheduler wasn’t updating the “last use” information correctly when generating multiple hours in a row.
Please give the new build 2511 a try.
If you still think there is something wrong, please generate a log file during playlist creation. I have added some more useful information to the log output.
With the new Update it works perfectly: Thank you soo much! ;D
I have been playing around with mAirlist 5 beta lately, especially with the new mini-scheduler and I’m beginning to understand the benefits of the new system.
I cannot figure out however how to apply the attribute filter in either the musictemplate or the hourtemplate. In my existing hourtemplates from mAirlist 4, the attribute filters which were set previously, are visible and can be adjusted as you can see in the image below. How do I address the non-visible attributes?
You must set up Standard Attributes (on database level, mAirListDB -> Administration -> Configuration -> Standard Attributes) first, then restart, then they are available in the list.
Not sure if this has changed in v5. Can’t recall any changes I made to that part of the code. But I might be wrong.
Thanks Torben for your quick reply. The attributes I set myself in mAirlist 4 still do not show up in the hourtemplates or musictemplates though. But they do show up in the mAirlist Configuration > Miscellaneous > Standard Attributes so they were imported from my previous version. What am I missing?
Torben would you be so kind to have a look at this issue again, I still can’t get it to work:
The custom attributes were previously set in mAirlist 4, they do show in the Configuration -> Miscellaneous -> Standard Attributes in mAirlist 5 but they do not show in the music or hourtemplates en thus can’t be used.
I did set up Standard Atrributes as you suggested on db level. Restarted the software and these standard attributes do show but the custom made Attributes still don’t appear.
When I open a musicfile in the database however, both the Standard Attributes and the Custom made Attributes are visible.
Thanks in advance for having a look at this again.
Ed
Sorry, high workload after the weekend… I’ll investigate it.
Try build 2518 please. All standard attributes - instance-level and DB-level - should be available in the template configuration now.
Great, thanks Torben. I will give it a try tonight or tomorrow and will keep you informed.
Problem solved, thanks again!