As we continue to dive deeper into different areas of GSelector, our goal is to provide you with a series of videos to help offer better scheduling control. We’re identifying what we want to happen and then applying GSelector scheduling techniques for a “set it and forget it” better music log. This week, we discussed Kicks and specifically the Category Group Settings.
A little background on the Category Groups Settings, which is found under Goals | Categories | 1, 2 down arrow icon, this is where users can define some of the “pre-scheduling” settings. First, we have the Pass Order, which is the order in which GSelector will schedule the log. Make a note that if you came from previous versions of Selector, GSelector will automatically add your new category into the Pass Order as the last line. It’s always important to review your Pass Order and make sure your primary categories are first, followed by any secondary or Link categories. One troubleshooting example, remember that GSelector will do EXACTLY what you tell it to do. So if you schedule a Twofer in a previous Pass Order before a category, then GSelector will schedule the Twofer first, which has nothing to reference, and then it will schedule the following category. If you find yourself with any type of odd scheduling behavior with Twofers or Related or Fly in Links, double check your Pass Order and make sure all of the song categories are first and in proper order. Users can also isolate or hide unwanted categories by defining the Scheduler Inclusion via the top right of the Category Group Settings.
Next, we have options for Goal and Rule scheduling configurations. If you want to disable Goals and have GSelector simply schedule as a pre-defined order, then use Spread Goals: Disable and Scheduler: Slotted. Otherwise, you have other Goal scheduling options, like scheduling based on All Songs in the station, just the Group Songs or if you want to give vocalists that are normally buried within the Pass Order list a little extra love during the scheduler, then utilize Pass Order Weighted. The Stacking column offers more Rule scheduling control via Default, Daypart or by the Hour. If you feel GSelector is finding it too easy to pick a song further down in a Category, then start to scale back the Depth. By default, we want to encourage GSelector to look at the entire library and make the best scheduling decisions, although you Library might offer “easier to schedule” elements. Remember, 100% would be the entire category, so adjusting the search depth to 75% will be 3/4th of a category, 50% would be half and 25% would only allow a quarter of the category to schedule.
If you incorrectly share a Disabled | Slotted Category and a Spread Goal category within the same Pass Order number, GSelector will throw an exclamation point error notifying the user to isolate Disabled | Slotted Categories in their own Pass Order. Otherwise, only Slotted or Kick are the only two options to allow access to the Kick Override tab.
Once within the Kick Override tab, users can define their 24/7 rotation. Don’t forget that by default, when you open this tab, GSelector will organize it by the next day ready to schedule. However, make sure that this is the same as the Kick Start Day, found under Setup | Station | Features | Miscellaneous. Users can also left click on the Date column header to sort by Kick Start Day. Users also have the option to change the grid, song displayed, add or remove kicks and copy Automatic Kicks to Manual Kick (For when users are making Clock changes and they don’t want GSelector to automatically re-choose kicks for each Clock change).
Although there are no right or wrong ways to customize your Kick Override grid, here’s a couple professional tips: Don’t kick within the primary dayparts because by definition, GSelector will skip over that single spin in order to achieve better 24/7 rotations. If you kick during primary dayparts, then you are telling GSelector to avoid playing the element for an entire rotation, leading to an unbalanced category turnover. We like to encourage users to kick during the overnight, specifically between 2am – 5am, pending on when the category begins a new rotation cycle. Also, if you find yourself with clock gaps throughout your week, don’t worry, simply continue the schedule pattern as if there were song positions during those hours. For example, there’s a Sunday morning acoustic show that deviates from normal rotation every Sunday from 6am – 9:59am. If you power category usually schedules twice an hour with a rotation of ABCDE, and we’ll say that 6am should start off with BC, 7am: DE, 8am: AB, 9am: CD, then 10am should start off with EA. Since there are no power positions scheduled in the clocks, GSelector is thinking you’ll want to return the 10am should continue with the original BC, however, the programmer understands that based on the continuous category rotation, we should kick 10am until we have the proper EA instead of BC. NOTE: There’s a chance that based on your defined clock requests, you’ll find better rotations with other kick options, again, there’s no right or wrong method, but utilize clock breaks to re-establish your 24/7 desired rotation.
Users can also adjust the order of the category via the Kick Override | Order tab. Programmers may adjust the order of the songs to counter any unbalanced turnovers. For example, if there are 5 songs in the power category and two songs are by the same artist, a programmer may want to push that same artist away from itself or adjust the order to accommodate an attribute like Sound Code or Tempo. If it’s music changes day, if the third song in the category was replaced by another song, programmers may want to adjust the new order so that the newest song added takes over position three, since that was the element that was taken out of rotation.
RCS has some special guests and surprises lined up for upcoming RCS Lives, including Zetta 5.20.1 new features, GSelector 4.9.0’s new Flex Clocks and more. As always, we’re still look for Beta users, don’t forget to check your backups and reach out if you have any questions or looking for workflow solutions. Don’t forget to follow us onwww.Facebook.com/RCSSoundSoftware for updates and we’ll see you every Thursday at 11am ET on Twitch, YouTube and Facebook.