It seems I have this issue about every three days. M1 schedules all of my Album/Edge category with very few stops for rule violations, then on the third day I get to about 8pm and it is constantly stopping with artist separation violation flags. And it shows me only a few choices. The search depth for the category is set at 20, but I’m then seeing only a few, maybe 5 or less and all with artist separation conflicts. Need some help please with an actual solution to fix this..more artists? what do I do?
…..What’s happening is you’re getting to the bottom of the card stack in the Edge list. A lot of hit artists’ songs have been ‘held back’ prevented from scheduling in the past/earlier hours, maybe in the previous day(s) because of artist conflicts. M1 gets down to the bottom of the list and all that remains are songs with artist problems.
Thing to always keep in mind: M1 is designed to give every song in every category the same number of spins….so they all have to be either scheduled or “flipped” by you when you’re in that situation. Get those final ones dealt with and M1 can then jump back to the top of the category and will again have plenty of choices for all the scheduling. It is not unusual to have smooth rolling of the category for some many days, then to come to one like you did where the final songs are by heavy-play artists and separation rules really come into play.
If you want that category to run smoother with fewer stops, you have to either 1) decrease the artist separation time on those problem artists. 2) remove some of the less important songs by those artists, maybe ‘platoon’ them, resting a bunch for a while then moving those into play and moving others out of play to rest. 3) packet the less important songs so you won’t have so many slots by the same artist(s) in the category.