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SOFTJOCK MUSIC LIBRARY Version 4.00 by SoftJock, Inc.
The SoftJock Music Library is not a stand alone program, it is a DLL library distributed with SoftJock Audio Software products, and forms the basis for all our music library functionality. It is a copyrighted work, and may only be used with SoftJock products, and cannot be redistributed, disassembled or used with any other products without expressed licensing, or written permission from SoftJock, Inc.
You can think of a library as a repository or catalog of the music on your computer or hard drives. It does not contain the actual songs, it is only a simple database that allows you to quickly list your music, search through your songs, etc.
With the advent of version 4.00, SoftJock Music Libraries are simple XML documents in database form, with a file extension in keeping with our past products (.rdf). The structure of the files are described at the end of this document, if you wish to interface your products with our libraries for import/export type ability.
With version 4.xx and above, playlists are now identical to a full library, with the only difference being the file extension, which is .rpf. We did this for a variety of reasons, but also to differentiate the two from a users standpoint.
Working with our Library Manager, you can create as many libraries as your computer can hold, and easily manage the songs in each library, perform utility tasks, tag your files, switch libraries, etc. The Library Manager is grouped by tabs at the top for Library Manager, Track Manager, Utilities, Export and Settings.
Working with the Library Manager is pretty straight forward, you can view the available libraries on your computer, add new ones, delete libraries, switch to another library and refresh the listing.
The display shows the Current Folder that is being displayed, the Active (Current) Library, the My Computer Navigation Tree, and the actual list of libraries in the selected folder. The Current Folder can be changed through the settings tab, if you wish a different folder to be displayed when Library Manager is brought up.
The list displays the name of the library in filename format, the date and time last modified, the number of tracks, the version of the library, and the full path to the library.
To create a new library, click the New Lib toolbar button, and you will see this screen:
Just type in the name (no file extension necessary), then click the Open button. Your new library will then show up in your listing. If you type the name of a library that already exists in that folder, you will get a message telling you so. You can now either highlight the new library and use the Switch To toolbar button, or just double-click it in the list to switch to it. At that point, it becomes the Active Library, and you can add to it, delete, etc.
If you choose to delete a library (you cannot delete the Active Library, you must Switch To another first), just click the Del Lib toolbar button, you will be asked "Are you sure?", then click Ok to delete it.
Refresh simply re-reads the current folder and displays the library information again.
Track Manager will manage all the songs in your Active (Current) Library. You can Add, Delete, Tag Edit and more through this tab. We'll go through the toolbar options from left to right.
ADD WIZ: The Add Wiz is a simple wizard that will guide you through adding music from your computer into the Active Library. Click the Add Wiz button to get started:
At the first screen, go ahead and click the Next button, and you will be brought to Step 2, which is where you select what drive and/or folder for the Wiz to search. Searching entire drives is easy, but also time consuming, and you usually end up with a bunch of Windows sound bite files as well, if you're searching your Windows boot up drive. In our example here, we keep our music in a folder called 1MZTest on the Local Disk C:, so we click the + sign next to Local Disk C: to open it up, and then highlight the folder we want to search. Any folders underneath the highlighted folder will be included in the search as well. Remember, you can search the entire drive as well, and that is what you would want to do if you keep your music on a separate hard drive, like a USB or Firewire drive. Click the Next button.
You can see in Step 3 above, the search has completed and found some files, click the Next button and you will see Step 4. You can simply click the Add button, and the Wiz will start adding the songs. If you have a large number of files, this can take some time, so be patient, as the Wiz reads each file for tag information, and in some cases needs to analyze a bit of the file for duration, etc. If any Exceptions occur during the adding process, the Exception button will become available when it is complete, and you can view the files that were not able to be added, and the possible cause. At this point, the Next button will change to a Finish button, and just click that. You will then see your music files displayed in the Track Manager.
ADD TRKS: This is the manual add function, and can be used interchangeably with the Wiz, although the Wiz is simpler to use. This screen is handy when you only want to add a few files from select folders though, as you can easily select the particular files from the list it generates.
As you can see, it's basically the Add Wiz put into one screen. You can select the drive or folder to search in the left pane, and the matching files found will be displayed in the right pane. In our example above, we would highlight the songs we want to add (or Select All), then click the Add button. As with the Wiz, if there are any Exceptions, the Exception button will become available so you can view them.
The Add Tracks does not search subfolders by default, so if you would like to have it look deeper than the current folder, check the Search Sub-Folders option, then highlight another folder to have it refresh the listing.
DELETE: Clicking this toolbar button will delete any songs that are highlighted. You can also simply hit the Delete key on your keyboard as well.
DEL ALL: This is used to remove all tracks from your library, and will prompt you before doing so.
Note: The delete functions above, do NOT delete the actual song files from your computer, only from the library database itself.
EDIT TAG: This will bring up the Tag Editor (double-clicking a song in the list will do the same). The Tag Editor allows you to change the MP3 (and in some cases WAV) tags associated with the song. These features change the actual values in the files tag.
You can simply type in any information you may want to change in the General Info (Genre has a pop-up list to choose from).
Other:
The BPM field (beats per minute), can either by typed in if you know it, or it was included on the album cover notes, or you can press the Scan button, and the program will scan the song and try to figure it out for you. The BPM scanner will generally return a good representation of the BPM for dance type songs and songs that have a pretty consistent beat throughout. Songs with quite a few breaks will usually not return a good BPM value, and may return all zeros if the scanner cannot figure it out.
The PlayCtr field is the play count for that song. All of our new software using the SoftJock Music Library utilizes the play count MP3 tag, and increments it each time a song is played. Other software may or may not use this tag item. You can either type in a value, or use the Reset button to reset the count to zero.
Album Art:
MP3 files can have album cover art embedded into their tag, and is nice to have for many programs that will display it while playing the song, such as our Multi Zone Audio, RockBox jukebox, etc. If your song has already been tagged with art, you will see it here, if not, you can add it. Please be aware that album cover art should not be large files (although it is possible), most cover art is 100x100 - 300x300 pixels, which is a reasonably small file size and adds very little to the actual MP3 files size.
Add Art: This will bring up a standard Windows file chooser dialog, and you can select a file direct from your computer.
Del Art: This will remove the art currently in the file tag.
Save To File: This allows you to save the art in the file tag (if any), to a file on your computer.
Lookup on Amazon: This allows you to use the Amazon Web Services to lookup up to 10 matches for album art in their extensive database of music products. A live internet connection is required in order to use this feature. If you click this button and results are found, you will see the following results screen:
In this case, it found 7 matching items. You can simply click on each to view the art associated with that particular album or product. Click OK if you want to place that art into the file tag.
File Info: This is read only information about the song file itself, and is for informational purposes only.
A note about WAV tags: WAV files generally do not have tag info in them. Some programs like AudioGrabber (our favorite ripping program), will append ID3 V1 tag info to the end of the WAV file if that option is selected in their setup screen. Our software can both read and write these tags, as well as our own similar tag info. Only general info tag data can be written to the WAV file, and BPM, PlayCtr and Album Art are not supported at this time. The status line at the bottom of the Tag Editor will reflect if, and what type of WAV tag is available for the particular file.
When you've completed any changes you may have made to the tag, simply click the Save button to return to the Track Manager screen.
TAG UPD: This is the Tag Update function. This simply re-reads the file tag as was done in the Add process, and update the tag info in our database. This is useful if you use an external tagging program such as Tag & Rename, and want the changes reflected in our library database. Simply click the button, and the tag will be re-read and updated in the library.
MULTI TAG: This is the Multi File Tag Editor, and allows you to do mass changes to more than one file tag at a time:
Each field on this screen has a corresponding check box next to it, and each song in the list also has a check box. In our example screen above, we checked the boxes next to 5 songs, and the Comment check box. We then added the "This is a test comment" into the comment field. When we click Save Tags, all of the tags will then have that tag item updated. The Amazon Lookup is slightly different here, as you need to type in some data into the following screen to lookup album art:
You can type in the artist name, or a portion thereof, then click search. You can also add album title to try to narrow it down, but our results show that unless the album name is typed pretty close to the actual, you generally do not get good results. The results screen (if any) is the same as the regular Tag Editor, so we won't repeat it here.
ALL: This selects all tracks in the Track Manager.
NONE: This un-selects all tracks in the Track Manager.
Using the Filter Option (lower right of Track Manager):
You can filter what tracks are shown in the Track Manager. Choose a field to filter on in the drop down box, type in some data, then click the Filt button. For example, choose artist, type in bruce springsteen, then click Filt, and if you have any songs by bruce springsteen, that is what will then be displayed. To return to the entire library listing, just click the All button.
The Utilities tab contains four commonly used functions to maintain your library.
CHK LNKS: This function will check for broken file links. Broken file links usually occur when you delete a file from a folder, or move it to a different folder. Since our software (along with most), use the full path and filename to keep track of the song file, if it is moved or deleted from the location it was in when added, it will generate a broken file link. If any are found, you can delete that record or records from the list at the bottom, and then re-add them to your library from the new location (if any).
CHK DUPES: This will check the library for duplicate records. There is an option in the Settings tab for controlling how this checks (filename or artist/title). If any duplicates are found, they will appear in the list, and can be deleted individually or as a group.
Note: The following two functions can be very time consuming and CPU intensive, so should not be run while music is playing, as it could cause the music to skip or stutter.
UPD TAGS: This is the same as the Tag Update in the Track Manager, but will update every record in the library from the file tags.
BPM SCAN: This will scan all songs in the library for BPM and update the records in our database. As with the BPM Scan in the Tag Editor, this will produce good results for songs with a consistent beat throughout, but marginal or no results for songs with many breaks.
The Export Tab allows you to export your libraries or playlists to a CSV file, which is a standard delimited text file that can be read and manipulated by programs like Microsoft Excel. This is useful if you want to print out lists of songs in a desired order or format.
You can export the Active Library, another library or a playlist through this screen. If you want to use other than the current active library, click the radio button next to the desired choice, then click the Browse button associated with that choice, and choose a library or playlist to export.
Choose the fields you want exported, whether you want a header with each items description, then click the Export button. A Windows File Save box will appear, and you can type in a filename for your exported file. No extension is necessary, as the file will automatically get a .csv extension.
Click the Save button on the File Save dialog, and the listing will be exported to the file you specified.
The SoftJock Music Library has a few features that can be customized for your particular setup. The settings are stored in a standard Windows INI file (SJLib.INI), and the library does not use the Windows Registry.
Startup Lib Folder: This is where the Library Manager will look for library files to display when it is opened. This can be changed via the Browse button.
Edit Settings Manually button: This is best only used by advanced users, and is useful if you want to change some of the tab and button text to another language.
WAV File Parsing: This is how the library will handle WAV file tags such as AudioGrabbers. Look for ID3V1 Tag at end of file tells the library to check for a simple MP3 ID3 tag at the end while parsing the WAV files. Allow tag writing to WAV, tells the library it's Ok to write tag data at the end of a WAV file while using the Tag Editor or Multi File Tag Editor. Note: Some players/decoders will generate an audible click when they reach the tag at the end of the WAV file, so if not sure, you can turn tag writing off.
Filename Mask: This is the mask we use to try to decipher a file with no tag data. This has it's own Help screen, so we will not duplicate it here. You can adjust this to match the way your filenames were put together by your ripping program.
Misc:
Dupe checking uses filename: If checked, the duplicate checking function in the Utilities Tab will check based on the full path and filename for duplicates. If unchecked, it will use Title/Artist fields for dupe checking (recommended).
Use Fast BPM Scan: This will only analyze the first minutes worth of samples in the file when doing a BPM scan. This is much faster, but may not produce as good of results for the scan.
SoftJock Music Libraries are basic XML documents in database type form. All libraries and playlists have the following first two lines.
<?xml
version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
SoftJockMusicLibrary is the root node, and must be closed at the end of the file. Attributes for the root node are library version number, date created and the number of tracks in the library.
Under the root node, there are a series of TRK records as seen below:
FN : Full path and filename of the track. AR : Artist name. AL : Album name. TI : Title of the song. GE: Genre.
BI = Basic Information, and consists of the following attributes: FT: Filtetype (MP3 or WAV). BP: BPM represented in string format. YR: Year.
NU = Numerical data, and consists of the following attributes: ID: Is an index value we use, can be zero. LE: Length of the track in seconds. PC: Play counter. HP: Has picture (album art) 0 = No, 1 = Yes. VL: Volume level to play this track at (0 - 100). SP: Start Point = Point to start playing song in seconds. EP: End Point = Point to stop playing song in seconds.
CU = Cue Point data, and consists of the following attributes. C1: Cue 1 in seconds. C1N: Cue 1 name (text). C2: Cue 2 in seconds. C2N: Cue 2 name (text).
© 2006, SoftJock, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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