Flip is used to adjust the rotation of songs in a category that would, by design, create a problem. For example…say you are a Hot CHR station and you have 9 songs in Heavy-Current. You format 3 Heavies per hour all 24 hours a day. What would happen with that plan would be that the ‘same’ three Heavies would be scheduled in the same hours every day because the Heavies would be the first category scheduled and the songs would most likely play in 1-2-3-4 rank order. So, with 9 songs in the group and 3 from the group every hour, the turnover would be 3-hours, which divides evenly into 24 hours. Thus, if songs 1, 2 and 3 scheduled in the midnight hour on monday, then after the whole day had been scheduled, songs 1-2 and 3 would be at the top of the stack again going into Tuesday where those three would again be scheduled in the midnight hour…and then the whole day’s Heavies would fall exactly where they scheduled on the previous day.
If you told M1 to ‘flip’ two tracks, then when it loaded up the Tuesday schedule, it would flip songs 1 and 2 and the first songs in the midnight hour would be 3, 4 and 5. And on Wednesday the first three would be 5, 6 and 7.
A category rotation is always a the result of a formula based on two things. 1) the number of songs in the category 2) the number of times the category is used on your format clocks during the week. When you look a the Average Turnover window of a category, it shows you what the rotation pattern of the category is going to be. If you see something that isn’t acceptable, maybe you see songs will be repeating in the same daypart two or three times in a row,then the best solution is to either add a few more songs to the category or take a few out. The “Change” box on category parameters window helps you quickly see what would happen if you either added or removed songs from the group. Remember, the ‘change’ box does nothing except help you plan. It does not change a rotation, only shows you what would happen ‘if’. The Flip box does change the rotation pattern.