- @(#)ANSWERS 1.12 4/19/94 - COMMON "WORKMAN" QUESTIONS (with answers!) 1. Do I have the latest version? 2. Why doesn't it play through the workstation's speaker? 3. How do I label several tracks in a row as part of the same song? 4. Can different tracks be by different artists? 5. Why does it eat more and more memory as it runs? 6. Why do I have to type all that information in? Isn't it on the CD? 7. Why doesn't WorkMan recognize a CD I know is in the database? 8. How do I get the controls to stop moving up and down? 9. Is there a Motif interface? --- 1. Do I have the latest version? The official ftp site for WorkMan is ftp.hyperion.com. Check there to see if there's a more recent version than the one you're using. The version number can be found in the About popup. If you don't have ftp access, mail ftpmail@hyperion.com a message with the following body: cd /WorkMan dir and a directory listing of the WorkMan directory will be mailed to you. If you see a more recent version (for instance, WorkMan-15.999.tar.Z), you can get it by mailing ftpmail@hyperion.com something like this: cd /WorkMan get WorkMan-15.999.tar.Z The file will be mailed back to you in uuencoded form, split into multiple parts if necessary. If you can't successfully unpack it, ask your system administrator for help. --- 2. Why doesn't it play through the workstation's speaker? The short answer: Because it can't. Most CD-ROM drives provide no way to read the audio data from the CD to the computer. This is a limitation in the hardware. The workaround is to run an audio patch cable (available at any decent stereo store) from the drive's headphone jack to the workstation's audio input; then run "cat /dev/audio > /dev/audio" (under SunOS) or "audiorecord -p line -s 44.1k -e linear -c 2 | audioplay" (under Solaris); you'll need to figure out what to do on other machines. On a PC with a sound card, you'll need to run some other utility to turn on the onboard amplifier until someone sends me source code to do it. I don't have a PC, so I can't tell you what utility to run. A couple of drives, for instance the Toshiba XM-3401, are capable of reading digital audio data from the CD, but the results are usually not too good. A future release of WorkMan may support playing audio through the computer's speaker on such drives. For SPARCstation users, I recommend not bothering with the speakerbox; instead, pick up a pair of cheap desktop speakers. Mine were made by a company called Labtec and cost me $20. If you do use the speakerbox, you will probably have to lower the volume on the CD drive to avoid clipping (which results in lots of distortion when loud sounds are played.) --- 3. How do I label several tracks in a row as part of the same song? There are several special symbols you can put into a track title to alter aspects of the main window's display. The most important is "//" (two forward slashes in a row.) This splits the title up into segments. Usually, each segment is displayed on its own line in the main window; a common use is to enter titles that are too big to fit on one line. For instance, you might enter a title like: The really really really really really//really really really long song That would add a second line of track title information to the main window, with the text after the "//"; the text before "//" would go on the first line of the window. The "//" itself is never displayed. If you leave out the "//" and just enter the long song title, the program will do its best to break the title into separate segments automatically. If a segment starts with "+", the rest of the text in the segment is displayed in place of the disc name on the main window. This is most often used when several tracks are related in some way (such as movements of a symphony.) For example, you might enter: +Symphony No. 2, op. 40//Allegro assai That title line has two segments. The second segment is displayed as the track title. Since the first segment begins with "+", the CD's title is replaced with "Symphony No. 2, op. 40" while the track in question is playing. As a shortcut, if a segment contains only a "+" character and nothing else, the "+" segment from the previous track is used. So you might have a group of tracks labeled: +Piano concerto in G//Allegro +//Andante Presto//+ +//Allegro assai - Andante -//Moderato marcato The third line is to demonstrate that the order of segments isn't important; "+" can come anywhere. The fourth track has the "Piano concerto in G" title, as well as a two-line track title. If you're not sure what the result will look like when you enter a title with several segments, just click on the track's selector button on the main window and the title will be displayed, even if the CD isn't playing. --- 4. Can different tracks be by different artists? Yes, using the same facilities described in answer #2. There is a second special character that can come at the front of a segment, "@". It causes the artist name on the main window display to be replaced with the rest of the text in the segment while the track in question is playing. "@" behaves in much the same way as "+" (e.g. if it's alone in a segment, the previous track's "@" segment is used.) A compilation CD's track titles might look like this: @Charles Gounod//+Ballet music from "Faust"//Allegretto @//+//Adagio @//+//Allegretto @//+//Moderato maestoso @//+//Moderato con moto @//+//Allegretto @//+//Allegro vivo @Friedrich Smetana//Symphonic poem "The Moldau" @Anton Dvorak//Slavonic Dance No. 2 in E minor @Adolphe Adam//Overture from "If I were King" --- 5. Why does it eat more and more memory as it runs? There is a bug in XView 3.0 (fixed in 3.0.1 and higher) that causes the library to lose a little bit of memory whenever an image is destroyed. Unfortunately, this happens twice a second while the About popup is displayed. If the About popup is left up overnight, the program can get bigger than you might expect. WorkMan doesn't update the About popup unless it's actually displayed onscreen, so unpin (dismiss) it when you're not using it and the program will stop growing. --- 6. Why do I have to type all that information in? Isn't it on the CD? Nope. It isn't. The MiniDisc format from Sony puts track information on the disc, but regular CDs don't contain a human-readable table of contents. So until WorkMan is extended to support MiniDisc players, you're stuck typing names in. --- 7. Why doesn't WorkMan recognize a CD I know is in the database? Sometimes you'll put in a CD, and the program won't recognize it even though you know you saw it in the database. What's likely happening is that you have a different pressing (publication run) of the CD than the person who entered it into the database. As I understand it, when they want to make more copies of a CD, they produce a new pressing master from the audio tape. Unfortunately, the track timings are different by a fraction of a second when they do that -- and since WorkMan uses track timings (down to 1/75 of a second accuracy) to identify a CD, the new pressing looks like a different disc. A future version of the program will let you set a control to recognize close matches; a popup saying "This CD could be XXX by XXX; is it?" will appear. --- 8. How do I get the controls to stop moving up and down? The window size changes as the program displays different track titles and other things. If you start the program with the "-geometry" option and give a negative number for the Y coordinate, the bottom of the window will be fixed in place and the controls won't move around. Note that you should specify only the window position, and not the size. For example, workman -geometry -0-500 would pop the window up on the right side of the screen, about halfway up (on screens of typical resolution.) "-0-0" will put the window slightly off the bottom of the screen because there's no way to tell how tall the window manager's decorations are. Play with the numbers until the WorkMan window pops up where you want it; under olwm version 3, "-0-38" will put the window in the lower right corner. --- 9. Is there a Motif interface? Not yet. A few people are working on one, among them . The idea is that you'll be able to choose between XView and Motif at compile time (or, if you have both, at runtime.) The Motif interface will become part of the standard source distribution when it's ready. I don't have the Motif libraries on the Suns I use to develop WorkMan, so any future interface changes in the XView code will probably precede the corresponding changes in the Motif code by a release or so. Unless someone wants to donate a SunOS Motif to me, that is.