Printing... to CSV

Is kJams missing a feature you need? Post it here! Note: if iTunes has it but kJams doesn't, it's a good bet kJams will have it, but that I just haven't gotten around to it yet. But go ahead and request it anyway!
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Sedge
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Printing... to CSV

Post by Sedge »

Just had a little brainstorm idea that should be pretty easy.

I know you want to eventually have a nice printing UI for songbook making, but here's a stopgap solution for now that I'm sure everyone could benefit from, and that should be pretty easy to code...

For printing, just have the Print command take the current playlist, and export a .csv file of whatever columns are visible.

Now, if you wanted to spend a tiny bit more time on this, you could have a little UI that allows the user to select what columns/column order they want, and if they wanted to print a selection or the entire playlist, etc.

Still, export to .CSV would take care of the headache of finding a spreadsheet program that will handle long sheets (10,000+ rows), but if the user wanted to open the list in a spreadsheet program, say for data verification, most will accept a .csv as valid input. Most "karaoke songbook creator" programs out there will also accept a .csv as custom input, and many will allow you to customize the fields a bit, so really, no spreadsheet program would be necessary.

Not sure what the state of your database is, but printing out a .CSV should be as easy as making a lightly formatted database dump from a search that's already been performed for screen display. There could be some silliness in regards to special characters, commas in artist names, etc - but even a tab delineated value .csv file should take easy care of that.

Just my little brainstorm - this would be an easy huge step forward in tackling a much-discussed and anticipated issue.

>>Sedge

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by dave »

i'll just add "Export->CSV"

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by El Ramos »

This feature would help me a lot right now. I renamed my music files "Artist - Title - Album-Track" using kJams, then suffered a hard disc crash and lost them. I restored the files from a previous backup, but kJams can't find them because they're simply named "AlbumTrack." The artist and title information is in kJams, but there's currently no way to apply them to the files.

If this .CSV export function existed, and it exported the Album and Track columns as well as Artist and Title, I could easily create a list.txt file which kJams could read to re-import the backup songs and then apply Artist and Title information to each one.

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by dave »

this really is no different than copy and paste, which is working today. or am i missing something?

http://karaoke.kjams.com/wiki/Printing

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by Sedge »

If I take the output from the clipboard, and paste it to a text file, I get what I think would be a tab delineated CSV format. You're right, I may be able to use this direct. I think what I am really trying to skip is any third party application between kJams and the book making software. I'll check my book software and see what order the spreadsheet is supposed to be in, and see if I can do it just using TextEdit. If I can, I will document it accordingly.

I think again, you're right, tab delineation is probably the way to go, due to special characters, punctuation in fields, etc.

>>Sedge

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by Sedge »

OK, tried this, total fail. I'm using FastTracks V2 SongBook Creator Basic to do the books, which did a beautiful job for me before I switched to kJams and using my Mac to host shows. (before I was using regular CDGs and CAVS/SCDGs.) Yes, it's a Windows program, but it does such a great job of formatting, I'm willing to forgive it.

Anyway, here is the format that it expects to get in an imported CSV -
"Song Title","Artist","DiscID",Track#

I think I will be giving it Song ID instead of Track #, and leaving DiscID as simply a manufacturer column (SC, CB, SF, DK, etc.)

Anyway, a tab delineated file will absolutely not work. I also need to make sure to get those quote marks in there, especially in title and artist fields.

I'm going to try another book maker software to see if it will handle things any better, but without some serious massaging in a spreadsheet program, this song book creator will never work.

>>Sedge

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by Sedge »

OK, here's the data for another program I was thinking of using at one time (never bought the license, but played with it a bit)
Karaoke Song Book Pro

CDNum, CDTitle, TrackNum, Title, AuthorBand, Category

Each of these fields should conform the following format...

CDNum - Text 20
CDTitle - Text 200
TrackNum - Integer 2
Title - Text 100
AuthorBand - Text 100
Category - Text 40

I don't even know if I'd want to use this, because I'd have to throw nonsense at it for the Category and CDTitle fields, then figure out a way to get kJams Song ID in to CDNum I suppose, because TrackNum is limited to a 2 digit integer. (then, more nonsense thrown at TrackNum) - and hope I could get it to format correctly.

Again, it's definitely comma delimited, and probably needs the title/artist fields in quotes. Headache.

I think I have one more program to check...

>>Sedge

(BTW, if anyone has suggestions for other book creation software for me to test out, more than happy to look into it)

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by Sedge »

Ok, third strike - Airwer Karaoke Song List Creator doesn't even seem to support importing a .csv file. In fact, the only way to get a "custom" disc in there seems to be to add it track by track. Not going to happen.

I'll keep digging.

>>Sedge

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by Sedge »

Trying some other stuff - Music Book Deluxe will accept either comma delimited or pipe delimited files, but not tab delimited. However, they will also accept CAVS juke files, and only require artist, title, and track number. So, there is some hope for getting this program working, but still with comma/quote csv files, unless the CAVS formats are a little more relaxed (and I think they are, but it's been a while since I looked at them.

Code: Select all

Column Format = Title-Artist-Disk (in that order).  Do not  include the column headers.

Note - Find/Replace:  Commas and Quotes cannot be used in any of these fields.  If they are used in the comma delimited text file, it throws off all of the other fields.  Use the "Find/Replace" option in Excel (or whatever word processor you use) to replace the commas and quotes with special characters... 

Replace all Quotes with the {Q} Characters.
Replace all Commas with the {C} Characters. 

Example-

Genie In A Bottle,Aguilera{C} Christina,A1S001-01
I Need To Know,Anthony{C} Marc,A1S001-02
Bailamos,Iglesias{C} Enrique,A1S001-03

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by Sedge »

KJ Pro - also promising, but it only accepts import from Excel files. As I want to NOT have to involve a spreadsheet program for this, I'm not looking too much further into this.

Aside from a couple more windows solutions from TriceraSoft, there really isn't much else out there. If I were a developer, I'd sure want to milk this niche a bit - I see something using Crystal Reports (or similar) for the actual nice page formatting, and very flexible import options. To this point, the effort seems to have been put into having a huge database of every manufactured disk ever created. With disks being replaced with digital formats, this thinking has to go...

>>Sedge

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by dave »

okay okay OKAAAAY already!!! i'll get CSV in the next release. relax! :D

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by Sedge »

Works perfectly! 8)

Too bad the songbook software has a couple glitches. The big one is using SongID for track number. I'm using the Manufacturer meta for Album, SongID for track, but my song IDs are up to 6 digits, currently in the 140000 area, I think. The songbook software won't properly process anything over 5 digits, they end up completely different - not just truncated. I have a sneaking suspicion that they really don't work over 65,535, or whatever the logical extent is of an INT of that magnitude, but I didn't check that close.

So, as there's no way currently of re-assigning SongID, sort of like defragmenting a hard drive, and getting my little 25,000 song library to fit in a number space under 65,000, I'm looking for other options - perhaps manually setting a meta tag to make my own SongID's? I don't know.

Every other issue just has to do with getting the text encoding right between Mac & PC - and the only character that really stands out is the colon :, because I assume you grant the colon a special character so as not to interfere with your dbase structure. That only affects two tracks, no big deal to fix.

I'm so close - I can feel it. Making this export to .csv is really helping, and a big step in the right direction. It will also make it super easy for me to write a little PHP to get my catalog on the web - not completely live, but close enough, as I can easily get PHP to read a .csv file and process the data. (or Perl, for that matter - yes, my web coding goes back a little ways)

No need to pursue this any further for now, unless you have other ideas about getting SongID to work out.

>>Sedge
(I have no internet at home currently - so most of my updates are either from my blackberry or from the library.)

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by dave »

Yes, you could use some other meta field for your SongID. Or you could decide you don't need to use song ID any more at all, and just have people name the song and manufacturer.

the encoding of the text is UTF8, so if you have your song book software interpret the data as UTF8 you'll be all set.

alternately: the colon should just be a "colon" (:), not a unicode "small colon" (﹕), that's a bug Update: which has been fixed.

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by cfspinner »

Sedge,

Currently, i'm using ms access for my songbooks. It has a great little report designer that will create just about anything you need. It will accept just about any kind of delimiter, pipe, tab, comma, or custom delimiters. You can easily create a table and either copy and paste your delimited file into it or have it import the data and create a report format that will output your data in any way you like. My website, http://www.offkeykaraoke.net, works off of an MS SQL database, so I currently have access connecting to it directly from my local machine for the data. So when songs are added to the database, they automatically show up on my website and are available for printing. I did a little experimenting with daves method of getting a text file from kjams and was able to import it directly into access without a problem.

I also use adobe acrobat, so once I create the access report, I save it to as a pdf right from access and add any additional pages I need like front and back covers, etc. I put it on a thumb drive and take it over to kinkos and make as many copies as I need. I have the songbooks wire bound and the front and back covers laminated. Printing is double sided so it saves on paper. I have the front and back covers and any additional pages I add printed in color, but the actual song listings are printed in black and white.

Books wind up costing me about 25 bucks each. Most folks print their own books and put the pages in page protectors. But I found that by the time you factor in the cost of ink, paper, binders, page protectors, time, its actually cheaper this way and the books come out looking very professionaly done.

Books usually last about a year. For new songs that are added throughout the year, I just print up suppliments that I put in a clip binder.

Below is a link to my songbook by artist.
http://www.offkeykaraoke.net/OffkeySongBook.pdf
Creator of the iSing Karaoke Locator for the iphone
[url]itms://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=334150511&mt=8&s=143441[/url]
http://www.karaokeblogs.com

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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by dave »

thanks for that!

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