Sometimes when I’m scheduling and do a song search, some of the songs show a violation flag as “Overplay”. What does that mean?
Two things can trigger this rule. First, it can mean the song with the flag is some number of plays ahead of the other songs in the category. One of the fundamental operations of M1 is that it schedules every song in a category before repeating any song. But you always have the option to manually search and schedule a specific song at any time. When you do, that song is one play ahead of everything else in it’s category. If you later do another search of the category and that song is included in the found-song set, it will have an Overplay flag, to remind you that it already has X-number more plays than other songs in the category.
You can set your own overplay number. Do that in System Settings on the Advanced tab.
The Overplay flag can also be triggered by the category’s Repeat Percentage setting. The default setting is 35%. Again, M1 in and by itself will not re-schedule a song until every other song in the category has been scheduled. But if you manually search-and-schedule a song, that song could possibly come up again in natural rotation quite soon. For example, say “Treat Me Nice” by Elvis is in a 50s Category and the category that has 100 songs in it and a 5 day turnover. It schedules on a Wednesday at 11am. After the schedule is finished, you are doing some editing and decide you want to replace some other track from the 50s category that has scheduled at 5pm. You do a search to bring up the entire 50s category. “Treat Me Nice” will be in the found-song list and will be flagged as “overplay” because less than 35% of the songs in that category have been scheduled since the last time it was scheduled (at 11am).
Again, you can always ignore the violation and schedule the songs as you choose. The Overplay flag is there only to alert you that if you schedule the song in the selected slot it will either be ‘ahead’ of the others in the category by X-number of spins, or it will be scheduled quite soon since its last play.