Can you help me with an artist separation problem?

I’m getting all kinds of stops for Artist separation problems.  M1 didn’t use to stop so much during scheduling.  Now, its taking me fifteen or twenty minutes to schedule and edit the log every day.

I got your library file and here’s what I found:  You’ve got four songs by Pink in your three Currents categories and others by her in Recent Hits & Recurrent categories.  Your rotation formatting calls for this many Pink “plays” a day:

Category A….7 plays a day
Category B…. 5 plays a day
Category C…..4 plays a day
Category D…..2 plays a day
Category E…..1 play a day

If every Pink song were 4 minutes long, that would give you a total of 76 minutes of Pink “content” every day.

That gives you a total of 19 Pink spins a day.  If every Pink song were 4 minutes long and all 19 were scheduled, that would have Pink taking up 76 minutes of “content space” every day. This can’t be done with the One Hour separation you’ve set on the artist.If Pink’s first song were to schedule exactly at midnight and were 4 minutes long, then next possible slot to schedule a Pink would be sometime after 1:04.   Chances that it would schedule precisely at 1:04 are slim.   So, maybe it schedules at 1:15 and is 4 minutes.  Then the next one by Pink couldn’t schedule until after 2:19.

M1 does its separation from the beginning and the end of each song. You have a Pink in your Hots, and the Hot category schedules first in the scheduling run. Now if the first Pink of the day was to schedule at 1 AM, then no other Pink could later schedule in the Midnight hour, because the “end” of the song, even if it were to schedule at exactly midnight, would be less than an hour away from the “start” of the Pink at 1am, so not Pink from your B or C category could be scheduled in the midnight hour.  And with the Pink “Hot” scheduled at 1am, then no other Pink could schedule until one hour AFTER that one is  over….sometime after 1:04.

Since Hots schedule first and your Hots each get 5 spins a day, that Pink song is dropped into the slots thru the day and each time it then closes a 2 hour “window”  (one hour before it and one hour after it).  Thus the Pink “Hot”, claims over 10 hours of scheduling day real-estate before M1 even begins scheduling the second of your Categories.  It is more than 10 hours, actually because the length of each song is counted as M1 observes the separation time.

You may not want to handle it this way, but FYI: I changed your Pink artist separation rule to 30 minutes and ran a schedule with your database.  M1 stopped with just three problems. Two were also Pink artist separations, but I easily resolved those by clicking ahead to the next hour and manually dropping the Pink into a proper slot there.  And the other stop was a Female run rule.  I resolved that and the day was done, without violations and it took me less than 60 seconds.