TuneTracker™ QuickTip

The Three-Finger Salute

A TuneTracker customer wrote to us, with the following dilemma:

"We have about 80 or so Xmas songs. We are playing 3 an hour 6am - 7pm when Delilah takes over. In log, we tried rotate Xmas songs - kept repeating too often. We then tried random Xmas songs. Problem now is the way we loaded music, there are for example 4 or 5 songs from Manheim Steamroller. They will now play in a row. Is there a way we can better rotate those Xmas songs so we get better rotation and not the same artist repeating?"

Our answer is below, and it will hopefully help others as well:

Random isn't working out for you for Christmas songs, because your protection in TuneStacker assumes a larger library...thus TuneStacker can't assure the smaller selection of Christmas songs will be protected adequately.

Rotate grabs the entire list of songs matching your rotation criteria such as "Rotate Comment Christmas" but it collects them sequentially out of the folders, meaning, just as you described, you ould have several MSR songs playing each time another Christmas song is called for.

There's one and only one solution I can think of. It requires a little up-front work, but with 80 or so songs, it shouldn't take too long to set up.

1. Put all your Christmas music into one folder with no subfolders
2. Use filenames on the songs that include numbers at the beginning, like this:
   001 - White Christmas - Bing Crosby.mp3
   002 - Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer - Gene Autry.mp3
   etc.

Rotate will gather the songs up in the numerical order indicated by the filenames and rotate through them in that order. Thus you can precisely control the Christmas music flow.

Back