Recycling is a process whereby songs that are scheduled in one part of the day are re-scheduled in another part of the day. Video and screen shots below.
First, a bit of history. Recycling was created as a kludge for the early DOS-based music schedulers. What’s that? Dictionary.com says a kludge is “inelegant, inefficient, clumsy, or patched together, (but) a kludge succeeds in solving a specific problem or performing a particular task.”
When those first schedulers came into widespread use in the early 80’s, music directors noticed that too many of their most important songs, particularly those in the Oldies categories, seemed to schedule time and again in the wee hours before dawn and not near enough in the prominent daylight hours. The problem was/is endemic in that software design. The kludge was to take the songs that were scheduled (usually) on the overnight show and re-schedule them in a different part of the day.
That’s the back-story. Radio guys hadn’t thought of recycling until they had problems with their DOS-music scheduler. I didn’t want to add recycling like that to M1 early on because a) M1 doesn’t have the design flaw that necessitates the kludge, and b) of more concern to me was doing it the way other software does can wreak havoc on the rotations of songs in categories that aren’t being recycled. For example, if a Coldplay song schedules at 12:10am another Coldplay song schedules at 9:50 and we then copy-paste (recycle) the midnight hour’s content to 10 am, we now have two Coldplay songs scheduled about 20 minutes apart and need to make an edit for the newly-created artist separation problem.
I resisted the occasional requests for a time until we designed a way to recycle that satisfies my rotation-control pickiness and is a helpful tool for some unique library formatting plans. What M1 does is to schedule the category(s) from Midnight until the marked hour, then it begins scheduling the same songs again as if the Midnight-to-Marked Hours had not existed.
You can order certain categories recycle; that is, reschedule the songs scheduled in the overnight shift, beginning again at a certain hour in the day. You could tell M1 to reschedule the Oldie category beginning at 6am. All the Oldies scheduled between midnight and the end of the 5am hour will be scheduled again from 6am forward.
The Recycle function is useful primarily by stations that have small libraries and very tight rotations. There are a couple of screenshots below for your reference. And here is a quick video about it.
