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Anyone using Natural Music

A

Adric1963

I'm curious what rules you're using..I'm having such problem with my currents that run in quick rotation. Would love to pick your brain on how you are dealing with poor scheduling.
 
Adric, I don't mean to be flippant, but your problem is your software. Natural is well known for not following it's own rules. Look into MusicMaster for quality logs: http://www.mmwin.com.

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Manny Michaels said:
Adric, I don't mean to be flippant, but your problem is your software. Natural is well known for not following it's own rules. Look into MusicMaster for quality logs: http://www.mmwin.com.

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Click to expand...

+1 on Natural Music being junk. I'd rather be forced to drink Natural Ice. Another low-cost, buyout-based alternative is Music 1, which does follow rules very nicely.
 
We set up five rotation categories. Hot upbeat new, Hot soft now, recurrents, Gold A heavy, GOld B light. We just set everything to rotate no random play.
 
Yea..I hear you on it being junk...I do have to take the time to manually fix the schedule..takes some time..but I get it done..probably no chance for anything else..boss wouldn't understand! Bit of a ..... has no idea what is happening around him or what we are going through.
 
I use it and think it is substandard too. I used to be a PD/MD for Clear Channel and used Selector, now that I am a part-time MD for a small group of stations using Natural Music I think it is a huge step down. I program the music for a New Country and Classic Rock station. I put the Classic Rock station together in Natural Music and it is impossible to do without a "Projected Turnover" grid. Also when you put just a couple rules on it has a zillion unscheduled positions. And you can't manually schedule a category either.
 
I have mixed feelings about Natural Music. Is it a major step down from selector, & Music Master yes! Will it get the job done? Yes.

With my Country, AC & Classic Hits station it works great. My Urban/Hip-Hop on the other hand, it has a hard time with music categories with fewer songs and very high repeat. It has a problem where if I schedule a category 4 times per hour (at :00, :15, :30, :45) the songs will not rotate through all the slots. So for a day a song may schedule at :00, :15, :00, :00, :45, :45, :45. It also has no feature to force current music categories that has no rules move up a hour or back. I tweak and adjust things when I get free time and I have found ways to make things work.

My advice if you just need to get by, then Natural Music will be it. If you need something closer to Selector, then get music master or music 1 looks pretty good, and the support for Music 1 should be great because its written by a radio programmer so they will understand what your trying to do. Natural Music support sometimes makes me want to throw my computer across my office.

Hope this helped.
 
Thanks for sharing your experiences with Natural Music. I schedule music for a New Country and Classic Rock format. For the most part the Country format is scheduling ok. But I have to keep a lot of songs in the current categories. I have 9 A's, 15 B's, 6 or 7 C's, 17 Power Recurrents. It's not perfect but seems to be allright. Without a "Projected Turnover" chart it makes it impossible to see how many Gold songs you should have in a category and how it will rotate. Don't know how they can't have this feature?

On the Classic Rock station. We were carrying 24/7 Classic Rock satelite but then switched to harddrive over the last few months. I manually have put all the categories and songs into Natural Music myself. It's really hard to get this to work without clumping of artists in categories. And the same issue with the Golds I have with the country formate. Any advice you can give on this?
 
I'm using NL on multiple stations and it works fine for me. Is it selector or MusicMaster? Of course not. It's not priced like that.

If you click on tools, format analaysis, you get a projected turnover in each category so you can adjust category plays or number of songs in a category to get the kind of turn you want. Using packets and dayparting you can slow down the rotation of specific songs within a category.

In Selector, MM or any scheduling program, the tighter you want to make the rules the harder it is to schedule. The programs costing thousands a year probably handle that a little better than a program costing under a grand one time.
 
ocradiofreak said:
It's really hard to get this to work without clumping of artists in categories. And the same issue with the Golds I have with the country formate. Any advice you can give on this?
Click to expand...

Sounds like you just need to run the spread artist feature. That will separate the artist.
 
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