I have satellite on the overnight shift, so the first hour I schedule is 6am. My currents have a 3:20 turnover. This morning (monday), One of the Currents scheduled at 6:05 and the same song scheduled again at 7:20. How could that happen?
You’d ‘shuffled’ the category after scheduling Sunday, so the Monday schedule was the first one after the shuffle. What happened was you didn’t give the “clear played flags” command when you did the shuffle. Here’s how it happens: say there are 13 songs in the category and the song in question is at rank position #12 before the shuffle and the category has songs #12 and #13 yet-to-schedule in this current pass thru the list…in other words, these two are the “top of the stack” at the moment, they would be the first two to be scheduled when you begin the next log. Now, you shuffle, but you don’t ‘clear played flags’ and the song that was at Rank position #12 maybe goes to Rank Position #1. Then you start the next schedule.
As the flags weren’t cleared, that song gets scheduled immediately…then song #13 gets scheduled….then M1 itself automatically clears the flags and begins scheduling at the top of the stack again…and the song is once again at the “top of the stack” and eligible for scheduling…so it schedules again as soon as it can, probably an hour later as soon as the artist separation rule frees it up.
Such a thing would only happen once, because after this seemingly ‘extra’ play, the category would settle down and be back to normal.
anytime you shuffle, whether you clear flags or not, the next pass thru the list is going be have a few oddities because the shuffle totally changes the card stack order. for this reason, it is always best to do the shuffle on weekends when listening patterns are quite different
than weekdays. and it is usually best to also clear the flags when you shuffle.