TuneTracker™ QuickTip

Making Format Improvements Also Improve Speed

Anyone who has added significantly to their music library knows that a larger library means an increased wait while music selection happens in TuneStacker. It only makes sense that randomizing among a huge number of files takes more time than randomizing among fewer files, right?

The good news is, exerting more control over your format will dramatically decrease the time it takes to generate logs. By being more specific about the kind of music you want each time TuneStacker is asked to do a randomization, TuneStacker has to randomize by a considerably smaller list of files. Result? Significantly faster log generation!

It does require you to initially take the time to do something that most stations should do anyway, and that's to mark each of their songs with at least one indication as to the style of the music. On our flagship "Haiku®RADIO" station, we now use the Genre field to do that. Since we have an "Extreme Variety" mix, our Genre categories include Modern, Classical, Jazz, Acoustic, Ambient, Folk, and Ethnic. Thus, our master logs look something like this:

Random Genre Classical Protect
Random Genre Acoustic Protect
Rotate Comment Sweeper
Random Genre Jazz Protect
Random Genre Modern Protect
Random Genre Jazz Protect
Random Genre Folk Protect
etc.

You might prefer another approach. Maybe you want to mark your songs using the Tempo attribute and do a mix of tempos in your format...

Random Tempo Fast Protect
Random Tempo Medium Protect
Random Tempo Slow Protect
Random Tempo Medium Protect
etc.

Or randomize by comment, based on the "imact" of the music, based on your own way of thinking.

Random Comment Light Protect
Random Comment Medium Protect
Random Comment Happy Protect
Random Comment Edgy Protect
Random Comment Dark Protect
Random Comment Serious Protect

Just come up with a system you like, and take advantage of the many ways you can rate music. If you take the time to mark your songs several different ways, you have even more flexibility. Note that we randomize by several different attributes in the mix below.

Random Tempo Fast Protect
Random Genre Hiphop Protect
Random Genre Soul Protect
Random Comment EveningsOnly Protect

Feel free to tweak your format and test your approach until you get the onair mix you like. If you need to, re-rate some of the songs if you change your mind about the category they fit best-into, and adjust the search criteria you use in your format here and there, Not only will the time you invest improve your on-air sound, but your logs will generate much faster!

Next time, we'll show you how you can set your system up to do "combo searches" that will let you search for each song using multiple critera.



Get these all the time!    Write to us and we'll add you to our weekly e-mail tiplist.


PRODUCTS - TESTIMONIALS - VIDEOS - SUPPORT - CONTACT - NEWS
Talk to a TuneTracker Systems expert right now:   920-672-8244