MusicMaster

MusicMaster is a music scheduling software produced by A-Ware Software (aka MusicMaster, Inc. of Dallas, Texas USA) and used by radio, Internet and television stations. Their main office is located in Dallas, Texas.

MusicMaster was created in 1983 by Joseph Knapp, an engineer, radio programmer and on-air personality for several stations in Ohio and Wisconsin, United States. Knapp believed that the decision-making process of selecting music for airplay could best be done using computers. In 1983, Knapp began writing a program he called Revolve, meant to improve the rotation of songs for airplay. Previously, music scheduling had been done by hand, as disc jockeys selected a song card from the front of a stack, played the track, and returned the card to the back of the stack to ensure that it was equally rotated with all available songs. With the use of computers, better decisions could be made based on a set of programmable rules. For instance, the rule of artist separation would ensure that two songs by the same artist needed to be separated by a given amount of time.

After selling the first copy of MusicMaster to WCXI-FM/Detroit, Knapp rewrote the program for the Radio Shack TRS-80 and then for the IBM PC. By 1985, it was licensed for distribution by Tapscan and sold as MusicScan. When a legal dispute ended A-ware's relationship with Tapscan in 1994, Knapp formed his own company and distributed the program as MusicMaster. In 2001, MusicMaster was ported to Microsoft Windows.

The heart of MusicMaster is a music database, which is custom built to the user's specifications. This database can include information such as song title, artist, trivia, and any other information the user needs to identify each song. The users can also add attributes to each song to identify the type, era, tempo, mood and other factors that will be used by MusicMaster to control the flow, balance and mix of the scheduled playlists using scheduling rules. The user creates rules based on these attributes using MusicMaster's Rule Tree system.