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Unequal rotations/Unscheduled Tracks

Hi everyone,


I looked through the forums and found one topic that was fairly close to my issue, but not quite.


I have three "Current" track groups set up with different playout policies for each.

Current_1 has 5 songs and has a Playout Policy of Title: 3 hr, Artist: 10 min

Current_2 has 7 songs and set to Title: 4 hr, Artist: 10 min

Current_3 has 10 songs and set to Title: 6 hr, Artist: 10 min

Each track group gets 1 selection per hour in the Clocks.


In each of those track groups, I'm getting an occasional flag: "Unscheduled - Unable to find a track in the track group 'Current_n' given the..."


When invoking Logged Tracks to see how things played in the last week, there are, for instance in the Current_3 track group, 4 songs out of the 10 that are playing slightly more often than expected, but 6 songs that only rarely get selected.  (25 plays per week vs. 4/week.)  I originally had the Playout Policies set tighter, for example a Title separation of 9 hours for 10 songs (1 per hour) with the same problem and thought that loosening the Title separation would solve it. I even set the Artist separation to 1 minute thinking that maybe another song by the same artist would be preventing the current song to be chosen.


I checked to make sure that none of the Playout Policies were set to all tracks. What am I missing?


Thanks.

Tom Weeden

WIXL-LP 97.1 FM

Madison, WI USA



Hi Tom,


When scheduling a track group, the scheduler looks at all the playout policies for that track group and works out all the tracks and artists that cannot play because of the policies. Of the tracks that remain in the track group, it selects one of the remaining tracks at random. If there are no tracks remaining, it will schedule an "Unscheduled" item. As you are relying on pseudorandomness it is not uncommon for some tracks to be played slightly more frequently than others. PlayIt Live does not currently operate a 'stacks' system like some schedulers. This is mainly because tracks can appear in multiple track groups.


What other track groups are being scheduled besides Current_1/2/3?

Hi Jason, thanks for getting back to me. Your explanation helped me see where most of my problems are occurring. I have another generic track group named "Songs" with a Title separation of 45 hours and an Artist separation of 2 hours. The 6 songs that were rarely being picked in the "Current_3" category were also in the "Songs" group. I've removed them from "Songs" and will put them back when they're no longer current. Doing the math, 4 plays a week x 45 hour separation from the other track group comes out to 180 hours which is pretty close to a 168 hour week. I've changed the Artist separation under "Songs" down to 30 minutes, which should help with some of the more popular Current_1/2 artists not coming up as often.


PlayIt Live is a wonderful system!


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