You’re in a time crunch and you must quickly massage the music log before you head out to your next meeting or live appearance. Don’t worry, GSelector’s Hotspot Filter is equipped to quickly display the lowest scoring transitions in your music log so that you can quickly fix any desired positions. For this week’s RCS Live, we broke down the Hotspot Filter, how to maximize it and review its benefits.
The Hotspot Filter’s goal is to easily identify low scoring elements, or hot spots within your daily music log. This typically caters more towards current stations with Artist heavy weighted Libraries. Since gold-based stations are rarely introducing new music that could sway the library balance, many current programmers, like Top 40 playlists, are finding that a power artist may directly contradict their target rotations. For example, a top selling artist right now may have a song in the Power, Subpower, and New Music categories, with an average artist turnover of 12 minutes, despite the programmer’s goal of a 40-minute artist turnover. Rather than constantly attempting to counter these unbalanced waves in programming, you can quickly identify these unique turnovers via GSelector’s Goals | Balance subtabs – either Artist or Attributes, pending on what you’re looking to discover. We’ve found that many programmers in charge of current playlists would prefer to let their powers schedule as is and then use additional GSelector features to manually adjust any transitions. Remember, it’s simply math – if you want to schedule a power artist, who’s average turnover is 12 minutes, and you have a rule that dictates it cannot play shorter than 40 minutes, that math simply does not compute. So let GSelector plot everything, prioritizing default rotations, and then use the Hotspot Filter to fix any problematic spots.
We’ve done past videos on GSelector’s Analysis tab, focusing on fixing a week’s Minimum Separation issues, but we’re found a growing number of programmers preferring to utilize the Hotspot Filter to better adjust their daily music logs. The second icon from the left within the Editor, the Hotspot Filter icon (Control + T) will open the Hotspot window, typically docked to the right of the Editor workspace. The Hotspot Filter includes Songs and Links, allowing the user to highlight or remove specific Goal Types and Attributes. Since most users prefer to only see problematic scores that they care about, we encourage programmers to filter this window to better focus the results. One of the new Hotspot Filter 5.1 enhancements includes the ability to save your Hotspot Filter settings. So, if you only care about Segue Bans, Clock Goals, Minimum Separation, Yesterday and Prior Day, then uncheck the rest of the Goals Types and now when you column filter by Lowest Score, you have less results to search through.
Speaking of searching through your results, let’s discuss what information we care and don’t care about while working within the Hotspot Filter. We’re not here to fix high scoring transitions, so mentally, where is your “low score?” If an element can play, then it is a Breakable Goal/Rule and has a score above 65. If the song violates an Unbreakable Rule, it will feature a score of 0. By default, the Hotspot Filter will display low scoring elements first and simply skim the first couple of songs/links, looking for 0 scores. Remember, we’re not massaging the log position by position because the Hotspot Filter allows programmers to work quicker through the playlist, fixing 0 scores. And by fixing, many programmers prefer to Juggle elements; Control + J to enable the row’s juggle, followed by another Control + J to swap positions.
The Hotspot Filter is an amazing GSelector tool to help programmers quickly and efficiently identify and fix low scoring transitions while massaging their music logs. Although, it’s available in all legacy versions, GSelector 5.1 is equipped with a Hotspot Filter save option. If you wanted to get your hands on the latest GSelector 5.1 or Zetta 5.22.1, become a Beta user today! Just reach out to your local RCS contact.
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