TuneTracker™ QuickTip

Using the "Gender" Attribute

Starting in AutoCast 4.1, you can take advantage of the Gender attribute, which gives you a lot of additional power when setting up your music mix. Now, in addition to Genre (style), Tempo, Comment, Rating, and some others, you can add Gender as a selection criteria.

In radio, "Gender" is often used more broadly than just "male" and "female." Stations generally rank the Gender of songs as Male, Female, Group, or Instrumental. You're not limited to just the four in our system. You could easily add more specific classifications like "Ensemble," "Orchestral," "Trio," or "Acapella." You can also compound several words together and use things like "GirlGroup."

When marking a songs' Gender attribute, consider the prevailing influence of the song. For example, a song by a group whose style is built around a strong male lead singer might be better marked with the Gender "Male" rather than "Group."

You can mark the songs individually by manually typing the information for each song into its Gender column, right in the folder containing the song. But you can also mark them in bulk using the new version of Army Knife that comes in AutoCast 4.1 and above. Drag a batch of them, or a whole folderful, into Army Knife, choose the Edit option, and after unchecking everything but the Gender field, type-in what you want and click Apply. Careful...you're changing multiple files. Better do a backup first in case you goof!

The Gender attribute is used in your master logs just as you would any other attribute. For example:

Random Gender Female

That line will find all the songs with the Gender, "Female," and randomly add one to your program log. But don't stop there! You can, and will probably want to, combine multiple attribute criteria, like this:

Random Gender Instrumental Tempo Medium
Random Gender Group Genre Metal Tempo Fast

Here's one with a unique use of the Gender attribute and no less than FIVE attributes!

Random Gender Quartet Genre Baroque Rating 3 Tempo Medium Comment Christmas

Want to cheat a little? Maybe you don't need Genre for your station's music mix, but you DO need to take advantage of the Gender attribute category for another purpose, because the others like Genre and Comment are already in use. In that case, steal Gender and use it for anything you like. Maybe use the Gender attribute to indicate whether a song is Holiday, Patriotic, Religious, or Novelty. Or use it to indicate a song's appropriateness to a certain daypart such as Mornings, Afternoons, Evenings, or Overnights.

As you can see, "Gender" adds an excellent new dimension to music selection. Consider ways it can be used to make your station sound even better!



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