Broadcasting- what software do you use for tracking music use?

[jason kanter]

Not sure if this is the right place to post this but I'm not sure where else to turn. I'm working at a broadcast station and they have a crazy system set up to track the music used in their programming. They need to keep track of the music they use for licensing purposes and they use iTunes as their main software in order to do this.

Basically they drop music into and pull music out of iTunes as needed. The entry date next to a song on iTunes them tells them the last time a song was used and in order to update the entry date to a song already in the library they make a wav copy of the song. Then at the end of the day they take all the songs used over the course of the day and manually type them into an excel spreadsheet to create their official "log". Although my background isn't in broadcasting it strikes me that there must be a WAY more efficient way to handle these tasks. Basically they need music library software with a robust database that can track song usage and spit out usage reports.

Like I said I know this is a post forum but I was hoping there are some broadcasting lurkers hanging about.

Any enlightenment would be greatly appreciated.

[jason kanter]

Wow- no broadcasters on here? Anyone know of a good broadcasting forum?

[Peter Morrison]

Hey Jason,

I don't know of any specific software packs that do this specifically, but your problem sounds like it could be easily solved with some sort of relational database in a program like Access or Filemaker.

Have one database that holds the songs, with all the data that needs to be stored for them and then have another database to track usage with a relational link to your songs.

Then at that point you can output all sorts of reports (songs used for the day, Company X's songs used over the past month, how many time song Y was used over the past year… etc)

I'm not the guy, but I have a guy who (at least a couple years ago) was a crazy Filemaker guru and could easily whip something up.

Peter

[dkerins]

RCS Selector

[Upside_Down]

+1

RCS Selector


Plenty of options for tracking music use.

[cubivore]

i worked at a public radio station and the broadcast engineer wrote a custom app that had all the entry fields and made a super log out of it.

[jason kanter]

Originally Posted by Peter Morrison

I'm not the guy, but I have a guy who (at least a couple years ago) was a crazy Filemaker guru and could easily whip something up.

Peter

Hey Peter,

Thanks, if you could PM his info it would be greatly appreciated. I'm going to try to find something off the shelf but if all else fails I might have to try the custom made route.

[jason kanter]

Originally Posted by Upside_Down

+1

RCS Selector


Plenty of options for tracking music use.

Will definitely check out RCS. Thanks guys!