There you are, listening to your station and you come across a transition that triggers your ear. “Eh, I don’t like that.” Why? What is it that you don’t like? In this RCS Live, we take a conceptual approach to understanding how to better your rotations and transitions by identifying transitions that you either like or don’t and then applying GSelector’s Goals, Rules and Priority Lists to help your station sound exactly the way YOU want it to sound.
We kicked off the video by first discussing the concept of identifying and isolating transitions. Remember, GSelector is GOAL and RULE based scheduling, which means that we can look at a transition between two elements and think to ourselves, “What about this transition do we like or what don’t we want to happen in the future?” That’s one of the biggest pieces of programming advice that we can give: isolate a transition and identify exactly want you want or not want to schedule. It’s easier said than done, so keep a simple approach. Two songs are scheduled back to back and first look at the attribute that caught your ear. Is it tempo? Mood? Sound Code? Low research scoring song? Was it based on time or a song positon? Everything can be controlled in GSelector as long as you know where to find it. For example, we looked at two songs that shouldn’t play back to back and reviewed how to find out why it has the score it does. Configure an attention grabbing highlight color (Tools | Global Settings | Appearances | Assignments For: User | Select your desired color) or make a note of the Failure Details window and any possible highlight. If there’s a particular attribute that you want to visually flag, you can right click and choose a color via Goals | Balance | Attributes | Expand the desired attribute.
Found under Goals | Priorities, next we reviewed GSelector’s Priority Lists. The idea is to define a Priority List with a series of Goals and Rules that can be intertwined during the scheduling process. As in, GSelector will take into account all Goals and Rules equally, as defined by the ranking/scoring Priority List definition. Don’t forget that by default, Goals cannot be made unbreakable, but Rules can either be Breakable (Score of 65+) or Unbreakable (0 and cannot scheduled). Once you have your set of Goals and Rules, we assign that Priority List to a particular category (or categories) and Daypart(s). Make a note of Themes and Twofers. Many users simply duplicate all of their Priority Lists and that’s not best practice when using an example like “Two for Tuesday” Twofer scheduling. If you maintain Vocalist Minimum Separation or Segue Bans of similar attributes, GSelector cannot properly schedule Twofers. For example, if you have Bon Jovi and maintain a single Priority List for all categories, then Bon Jovi’s second Twofer song will not schedule by either the Vocalist Minimum Separation or Segue Ban: Sound Code: 80s Hair into 80s Hair. Utilizing our philosophy of identifying transitions, when you see that the second Twofer has been left unscheduled, go to your Editor, manually insert the desired element and note the Failure Details window or the score of the element and figure out exactly why it can’t play. Users can also double click on the element, bringing them to the Library | Song tab and then look at the Adjustments tab to see why, when, and where, that element cannot schedule. You can also find a generic overview of these types of settings via Goals | Balance | Adjustments.
While working through Priorities Lists, we also covered the Rotations Rules window, breaking down all of the rules featured within the Rotation Rules window. Make a note of the Show Assigned Values, F3 to copy cell, F8 to copy the entire row and if you double click on the header, GSelector will maximize the Rotation Rules window. If you’re looking to combine dayparts so that you only have to set values once, while still maintaining Daypart Rotations, users can combine dayparts via Setup | Dayparts | Definition | Add a Group value | Make sure that each desired combined daypart has the same defined Group value. We also covered the significance of Hour Rotation and its ties to Dayparts. After breaking down the Rule via F1 Dynamic Help, remember that Hour Rotation Rule will rotate the element in different hours as defined by the specific daypart. Simply put, if my afternoon drive daypart encompasses 3pm, 4pm, 5pm, and 6pm, then the Hour Rotation rule will rotate within 3-6:59pm, not 12am – 11:59pm. So if you make a blanket Hour Rotation rule of 4, you are telling GSelector to play in 3pm, then 4pm, 5pm, and finally 6pm before returning to 3pm. That’s a tight window, especially with other rules like Yesterday (Same Hour). Of course, we wanted to keep this example simple with sequential order. Normally GSelector will schedule in a single hour and then not schedule that element in the same hour again until the Hour Rotation Rule value has been completed. If you’re looking to implement some of these rules you’ve learned, make a point to start small and then gradually increase your values. You’ll know that you’ve gone too far by the broad category spin count (Analysis | Current Station) or unscheduled positions (Scheduler | Current Station).
Finally, we covered some generic Goals and Rules, including the differences between Linear and Radial Spread. Think of Linear as left to right or 12am – 11:59pm, whereas Radial is Wednesday at 12pm and GSelector will look around the scheduled element in a circular fashion, Tuesday at 11am and Thursday at 1pm. We also covered Multi Attribute Timed Segue Bans so that users can ban two different attributes from playing next to one another. For example, a Classic Hits station may want to avoid scheduling Era: Pre-1969 into a Research Score: Low Testing Song. Finally, if your categories seem to have a wider spin count, programmers can tighten them via the Airplay Starvation Goal. Essentially, your category should spin around 10 spins per week, however, when you check the Analysis, you find that there are some elements that are 5 spins and others are 15. To close that gap, enable the Airplay Starvation Goal to tighten the spin count to something more like 8 and 12 spins. You can set the Maximum Airplay Starvation Turnover Percentage via Setup | Station | Features | Advanced. Users can define a range from 150% (1.5 times through the category) to 200% (2 times through a category) before GSelector encourages the non-scheduled element to schedule with a higher score.
Looking for more ways to watch our weekly RCS Lives? You can now stream us on multiple platforms including Twitch, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn and you can still comment or ask your questions via any interface of your choosing! We’ll also be sending out reminders to each medium, so that you’ll see a full list of upcoming topics. Reminder to take and double check your backups and Data Exchanges and we’re always looking for GSelector 4.9.0 and Zetta 5.20.1 Beta users. If you’re interested, reach out to your local RCS Support department or Sales Representative. As always, we’ll see you next Thursday at 11am ET for another RCS Live!
