Hi Tom,
Setting a playout policy for a specific group does not override any policies for other groups. So if a track appears in multiple groups it will check all policies to ensure that a track does not play too frequently. If you have still not figured it out you can send me your data using this tool https://downloads.playitsoftware.com/DiagnosticsTool/PlayItDiagnosticsTool.exe and I can take a look.
Thanks very much Jason. I tried a couple of other things and examined all the playout policies that were listed in the error messages, but still haven't figured it out. Sending the diagnostic file now, reference WIXL-LP...
It looks like Rock pre-1990 (filtered) is your culprit. This contains both Stryper and Stryper- (with a hyphen) artists. This is causing it to run out of tracks and violate the Switchback Saturday T6h-A60m policy.
Tom Weeden
We have a new weekend show starting up on 97x.fm featuring a single band (Stryper for you 80s hair metal fans). The DJ has provided 62 songs, and I've set up the playout policy to zero for artist separation (because there's only one artist), and 130 minutes for Track separation so there are no repeats in the 2-hour show. Every time I run a Playout Log, it schedules 10 songs at the beginning of the hour, then the rest of the hour is "Unable to schedule..." and fills out the hour with unrelated songs. There are 18 Playout Policies set up, and I've checked every one without figuring out what I'm doing wrong. The original track group was filtered with Artist = Stryper, but after I kept getting the same result, I created a standard track group and added all the Stryper songs manually. No change. I even tried scheduling a Playout Log for this 2-hour block well into the future with all other nearby hours unscheduled to avoid conflicts, and the results are similar.
Is the policy Artist = 0 causing my problem? Or is there something else I'm not seeing? Is it simply because there aren't enough songs to select from? About 30-35 would be needed for a 2-hour show out of 62 available.
--Tom