Title Separation Rule

I see there is a title separation rule for each category. Does that mean that the title separation rule applies to the individual songs in each category, or does it apply universally?

Title separation only applies to songs of same title in “other” categories. If you have “Chattahoochie” and “Chattahoochie – Live” both in Power Gold and you have a 4 hour title separation on Power Gold, that does not affect the two Chattahoochies within the Power Gold category. If you had one at Rank #1 and the other at Rank #2 in the category card stack….and if your Alan Jackson Artist separation was set at 1 hour…then the second Chattahoochie could schedule just over an hour after the first one.

Title separation in this example only would come into play if “Chattahoochie – Live” were in a different category. The studio version would schedule from Power Gold…then if the Live version were in Secondary Gold, it would be prevented from scheduling within 4 hours (or your setting). Two reasons for this….in the early days we saw too many people setting up something like this: a Hot Currents rotation with a 3 hour turnover, then applying a 4 hour Title separation to the category and, of course, M1 would begin immediately with title separation problems in the 3am hour.

If both copies of a song are to be in the same category, then just be sure they are well spaced in category Rank order. If you have 300 songs in Power Gold…then there should be about 125 to 150 other songs in the category rank/stack between those two.

Title separation can be assigned to each category separately. Here’s how it works: If “I’m a Believer” by Smash Mouth is in “90s Hits” and you’ve set that category’s separation at 30 minutes, and “I’m A Believer” by the Monkees is in “60s Hits” with a title separation of 2 hours, then these two songs will be separated by 2 hours which is the larger of the two title separations.

Title Separation works only across categories. If a Nostalgia station has three versions of “Fly Me To The Moon” all within the same category, the Title Separation setting on the category is not applied to them within the category. It is only functional as related to the same title that may be in other categories. If you have more than one song of the same title in the same category, they should be spread in rank order. Like, if the category has 200 songs, place one of the songs at position 50 and the other at position 150. Then they’ll never be scheduled close together.

Why M1 won’t let me set a wider title separation

In my POWER category, average turnover is 2h 44m. In Category Rules, I want to set Title Separation to 1h 45m, or even to 1h 50m. But it won’t let me. I set it, I save the changes and when I go back to category rules screen, title separation is 1h 30m again.

This is correct. M1 will not let you set this rule in such a way that would be near-impossible to obtain. If a separation is set at 90 minutes…that means there will be a 3 hour “window”…..90 minutes before the slot where the song is scheduled and 90 minutes after it is scheduled. If the turnover is calculated at 2:44….that is very near the 3-hour mark. Actually, I’m a bit surprised M1 even lets that be set…I would expect it to automatically set it to somewhat less than that time. But, you really don’t need to worry about this because M1 is not going to let the songs in this category schedule too close together anyway…even without that rule.

This is the Power category, so should be first in the scheduling/pass order. That means songs in this category are almost always going to schedule in 1-2-3 rank order. All the songs in the group will always get a turnover/repeat of about 2:40 even without any rule to specifically require it. The only things that interfere with this are:

1) If you do some manual search-and-replace of songs in the category; and

2) After a “shuffle”. That changes the card stack order, so the next schedule you run after a shuffle, songs that scheduled in the 11pm hour on the final day before the shuffle, may be at the top of the stack, as M1 starts dropping songs into the midnight hour of the first schedule after the shuffle. To protect against a song that scheduled at, say 11:50 from being re-scheduled very soon after midnight in the new day, Version 7 has the new “repeat percentage” rule that prevents a song from being re-scheduled until at least X-% of the category has been scheduled since the “previous” play of any song. The default setting is 35%. This new functional rule was installed just to take care of the repeat-too-soon-after-a-shuffle possibility. So with this rule in force, if a song in Power Current schedules at 11:50 pm on Friday, you shuffle and that song moves to the top of the category stack and would normally be the first Power to schedule in the midnight hour on Saturday, M1 will “hold” it back until 35% of the category has scheduled, meaning that song (with your 2:40 turnover) would probably next get scheduled sometime between 1 and 1:30am.