You’ve been hearing a lot about our Beta users raving about GSelector’s new Flex Clocks, but did you know there are more enhancements in GSelector 4.9.0 that will help improve your everyday workflows? Now that GSelector 4.9.0 is officially released, in this video we’ll breakdown some of the new features and review a couple significant enhancements from previous GSelector versions.
Let’s start with Flex Clocks, which are essentially granular clocks broken down by the hour or the minute. Users can essentially schedule a 1-minute clock or up to a single 24-hour clock. Flex Clocks are a setting that can be enabled or disabled via Setup | Station | Features | Advanced | Time Granularity of Clock Assignment: Hour or Minutes. Once enabled, users can begin to work within the Clocks | Assignment | Grid tab. Make a note of the new Change View, bullet outline icon, that allows you to adjust the granularity from 60 minutes to a minute. Working within the Clocks | Assignment | Grids window, treat this as an updated Clock Grid with the same behavior and keystrokes as before, only with the added ability to drag individual clock’s time and expanded duration control or display. A couple behaviors to note, GSelector will not allow the user to leave the Clock Grid window with a portion of the day/hour left unassigned. And don’t worry, there’s a notification that will pop up letting you know that you have to fix the grid. Next, understand that GSelector will do exactly what you want it to do! For example, if there’s a 45-minute clock that is scheduled to span over 4 hours, then GSelector will schedule those 45 minutes and that’s it for the next four hours. Just be aware of the duration of your individual clocks over the desired duration across multiple hour ranges. In addition, GSelector cannot carry clocks over into another day. Simply put, once we finish a day, GSelector will treat the next day as an entirely new entity.
Next, we covered a feature that was introduced in GSelector 4.8.1: Local Blocks. Think of Local Blocks as similar to Spot Blocks, with start and end triggers, however, instead of commercial traffic, we’re scheduling music and imaging. The concept is that when we utilize GSelector’s S3, Schedule Subscription Service, we need a form of scheduling that the local clocks can override the S3 music positions. A user would create the Local Block, include all of the desired elements inside of it, and then schedule the Local Block within the clock structure. This could be a generic “news, traffic, weather” grouping or a “Top 5 at 5” that requires five music positions outside of the S3 schedule. For that example, a user could define five Browse List “Top 5 at 5” positions, schedule it for the top of the hour at 5pm, and then GSelector will bring in the S3 music log for those positions outside of the Local Block. Don’t forget, like Spot Blocks, one line is a “start,” GSelector will play everything within and then the last position will be an “end.”
Also new to GSelector 4.9.0, we introduced multiple Association Reports, specifically many international reports that had been missing previously. Of course, don’t forget, GSelector can export BMI or ASCAP reporting from the Interface | Export | Schedule or a Sound Exchange Report from Interface | Association | Choose your Country and corresponding report. Nothing to change other than the date range and the destination path.
If you recall in past GSelector RCS Live videos, we discussed the concept of Jobs. Jobs allow the user to define an automatic process that can include an email success or failure. Step One was to introduce Jobs and step two included expanding job tasks. Make a note of the new Housekeeping Job, as well as the Licensing Job found under Tools | Licensing | Top right, define an email and desired configuration. Otherwise, the remaining jobs can be found under Tools | Configuration | Jobs.
Of course users can have unlimited values defined under specific GSelector attributes, like Station Content, which can include unlimited scheduling values. However, GSelector previously only had 10 User Defined Fields. Now, we’ve expanded that to include 99+ User Defined Fields. We also expanded on how users interpret those custom User Defined Fields. There’s a checkbox for True or False, Text, Date or Number and each additional User Defined Field would need to be identified first via Tools | Global Settings | User Defined and then that User Defined Field would be available for further editing via the Song cart: Library | Song | Additional. And yes, there are ways to incorporate these custom User Defined Fields into the scheduling process.
Finally, we discussed some of the expanded attributes that users can match on within Related Links. A refresher, Related Links are specific pieces of imaging that are tied to a relationship as defined within the Song and Link. Fly In Links (Linker | Related Links | Fly In Links) are in addition to the default clock position, so that if GSelector identifies a better, more specific imaging element, then GSelector can fly in that piece of imaging, and/or removing the previously scheduled generic piece of imaging. Users can also schedule these Related Links in the Clocks with either a Leading or Trailing Link with an option for a generic fallback imaging category if a more specific relationship is not found or violates an Unbreakable Rule (Linker | Related Links | Clock). In previous versions of GSelector, there were only a handful of Linker attributes to match on, now, we include many more attributes, specifically all of those new 99+ custom User Defined Fields, allowing for more efficient music / imaging scheduling relationships.
If you want to be on the ground floor of the latest and greatest RCS products, become a Beta user! You’ll get your own RCS Beta User contact and you get to be the first to try any and all new features. If you’re interested, we’re currently looking for Zetta 5.21.1 Beta users and simply reach out to your RCS contact for more information. Also, don’t forget to make sure you’re taking a Data Exchange backup, as well as double checking your backup path is working correctly. We’ll be live once again next Thursday at 11am ET for RCS Live. Check us out on Twitch, YouTube and follow us on Facebook. If there’s a topic you want covered, don’t hesitate to reach out or comment on one of our previous RCS Lives!
