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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cfspinner
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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by cfspinner »

dave wrote:thanks for that!
YW. Wonder if I could make a few bucks by doing it for folks....whaddya think Dave?
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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Sedge
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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by Sedge »

I'd certainly kick down a little cash for your Access files. I know I can get the data to Access, but I'm not so clear on how to create the report and print to PDF - I assume this takes at least Acrobat Standard, which I can get onto my Windows machine that has Access on it. Having your Access project to work from would be a big help. I'd happily agree to not resell the Access files or profit from them doing a similar service.

I'd be OK with just sending you a raw output file, but I'm really picky about my books, and I'd want to proof them a few times over before actually printing. I wouldn't expect you to put that much time into it. I think for my current books, which just have the songs I actually had on SCDG and CDG two years ago, I must have printed at least 3 copies to PDF, and probably another 2-3 to paper before actually going to Kinko's. That was for about 6,000 songs, or roughly 160 pages (80 double sided)

Now, with 22,000 songs, the last print sample I took was about 600 pages, (300 double sided). So, pretty pricey to go print - not to mention the cost of 300 sheet protectors and huge heavy duty binders. I may try different binding options this time, although my primary objective is to downsize my song collection, removing duplicates especially. I may end up having to use separate books for "by artist" and and "by title" - although my current books have both (front and back sections) and the page counts above reflect that.

Any way I do it, it's going to be a pretty expensive undertaking to update the songbooks, so I'm willing to take the time to make sure they are as perfect as possible before "going to press" with them.

>>Sedge

dave
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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by dave »

dunno man, whatever the market will bear i guess :)

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cfspinner
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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by cfspinner »

Sedge,

Send me the raw output file, excel or tab delimited text will be fine, and an example of what you want your books to look like. Lemme see if I can whip something up.
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

dave
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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by dave »

8)

El Ramos
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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by El Ramos »

CSV export works well for me, with two exceptions:

1. Diacritical marks (ñ, ö, é, etc.) are exporting as strings of 2 other characters. For example, Mötley Crüe exports as "M√∂tley Cr√ºe".

2. Quotation marks in artist names move around. For example, "Weird" Al Yankovic becomes Weird" Al Yankovic" .

Any idea how to fix these? Maybe export as Unicode and use curly quotes (“”)?

dave
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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by dave »

1: the exported CSV file is encoded as UTF8, if you interpret it as such, you will get correct diacriticals
2: you're right, the quotes should be curlified so they do not conflict with the "field delimiting" quotes

Garyoke
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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by Garyoke »

cfspinner,

I have a couple of questions about how you built your books using Access.

1) I noticed you have the artist name larger and in bold, and then all of the
song titles for that artist smaller and below the artist name. Does Access'
report creator do that automatically for you? I like the idea of only
printing the artist name once, as opposed to printing the artist name on
each and every line.

2) Does Access have a simple way to remove duplicates? I'm one of those
guys that has 70,000+ songs, but many of them are duplicates either in
the same brand or across different brands (I've been doing this here in
the Bay Area since 1985). Ideally, I'd love to print out my book in
three columns, listing the Artist name once, then the track names below
the artist name (without duplicates), and NO song ID numbers at all.
Half of my singers either forget the number or write down the wrong
number, so I'm inclined to just eliminate that from the equation.

I'd appreciate any feedback you can offer.

Thanks,
--G

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cfspinner
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Re: Printing... to CSV

Post by cfspinner »

Sorry it took so long to get back to you Gary.

As far as your first question, its all in how you create the base report in the report creator. your initial query would return your results sorted by artist, then title.

you then create a report header and configure it to group by artist and format the text the way you want it, then you create your report detail section to output the records for each artist.

In regards to your second question, the way to remove duplicates is based on how you structure the original query that returns the records.

Say you have 3 of the same songs by the same artist, but with different songnumbers.

You're query would look like this:

select distinct artist, title
from songlist
order by artist, title

As long as the artist and title are spelled exactly the same way in all three records, this statement would only return one record. If you added the songnumber to the statement, since they're different, it would return all three. Or say if one of the song titles was spelled differently. In that case it would return two records.

As an aside, printing just three columns per page would create a huge book. Thats why I went with a double column layout outputting three columns, artist, title and songnumber within each of the two main columns. Access automatically calculates where to break the column at the bottom of the page and pick back up at the top of the page.

I have about 22,000 unique songs and my books come out to around 247 pages. If I were to only use one main column per page, it would wind up being double that! over 490 pages. I have mine printed double sided so my books wind up being only around 120 plus pages. Makes for lower cost, lighter and longer lasting books.

hope this helps and again sorry for not getting back to you sooner.
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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