We have a new show that has a series of short stories.  These are in our "poems and short stories" category.  They are separated with two styles - long stories and short stories, so there two formats and we have one long and one short story in each show. 

The problem I have is that the same stories are being scheduled.  Although there enough to cover a week without any of them repeating themselves, we have some being scheduled 2 - 3 times in a week and others not being used at all.  I cannot work out why this is and how to stop it happening.  We've never really had this come up before as we've never really done a show like this.  It must be something obvious.

Autotrack is version 2.

Neil

Do you have tempo etc set?  That can sometimes cause things not to be scheduled if they are different.  Also when you review the log click into it to see the tested items, if something was rejected it'll tell you what the reason was although you may have to turn that option on IIRC.

When you view the cart deck there is also a colum which shows how many times something has failed to schedule, some will be on zero and the unscheduled one will be on a reasonably high number, doesn't show any detail but will confirm if it's being tested for scheduling.

Although this is for V3 so may not apply...

Craig Arthur

Engineering & IT Manager
Radio Royal, Royal 2 & Royal Gold.

None of that seems to be applicable to version 2.6 of Autotrack, maybe it applies to Autotrack Pro or version 3 upwards. 

I have tried shuffling the decks and that seems to have helped a little so I will see how it goes.  Any more help would be appreciated though.  It must be something obvious.

How far is it "throwing" used tracks down the pack?  Having said that, even at 100% a system I use on 2.6 still seems to repeat stuff it hasn't played recently in favour of tracks that it has.  MAybe it's a 2.6 thing?

Silly question, is this in a song or link category?

Songs are subject to lots of rules, (like cant play the same artist within xx hours - especially if you have all the stories labelled as the same Artisit i.e. "Short Stories") links are not and can just rotate around the decks evenly.

If it were me, i'd have a Short & Long link cats, and then place those in the clock where you need them, if you place them an even number of times in the clocks - have an odd number of items in the category so they don't come up in the same time each week.

Regards

David Boulton
Brand Manager
Broadcast Radio Ltd