I’ve recently completed another marathon, parsing through all the MUSICIANS letter folders in the High Voltage collection. I’ve added a bunch of new tags for thousands and thousands of tunes. Needless to say, it took several weeks (if not months) to get through and I got myself a severe case of mouse arm. Turns out using the middle mouse button so much is bad for a nerd of my age.
But I got through it and I guess it’s time to talk about what I did.
The biggest and most important reason to go through all those SID tunes again was to add events and link them to productions. The production would be what the SID tune was meant to be used for. It could be a demo, an intro, a game, a tool, even as part of a music competition – a lot of things. Some of these productions were released at an event, which would typically be a computer party.
I also wanted to connect the two tag types with a new bracket line between them. This would indicate that the production was released at that event, and that’s what the SID file was made for.
To help me get through the monumental task, I added a few more features to DeepSID to make the task a little bit easier. I invented iconic tags for music and collections, and for those I added buttons in the dialog box for tags. Here I also added a magical wand button for figuring out the most logical combination of event and production to connect with a bracket, depending on the tags already selected.
Especially the button for collections got red hot during these tagging times. Everyone and his dog has a fecking collection, and typically even several of them. I’m not sure it was worth it adding all those collection tags. Probably not. But now it has been done and they’re there.
I also added a better highlighting system for CSDb entries. Apart from the usual highlighting of group names that matches the copyright line, I also added highlighting in two other colors for matching any of the groups the composer has been a member of, as well as his name or handle. Finally I added a button to filter the list of many CSDb entries down to only showing those that are highlighted.
Now that I was going through all those tunes anyway, I also invented some new tags for various other kinds of information. Let’s go through them below:
| Tag | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Unearthed | Used when the SID file was released at a much later time than when it was composed. Usually derived from a STIL comment about it. |
| Recycled | A red warning tag to indicate that the composer reused the SID file in multiple competitions, which is generally frowned upon. |
| Compo | Indicates a competition. It’s only supposed to accompany a music tag. For other kinds of productions, it’s enough to just link the event and the production. |
| #12 | A ranking in a music competition. For #1 a golden “Winner” tag is used, and then #2 to #19. For higher rankings, a rounded number is used: #20+, #30+, etc. |
| Solitary | The only contender in the music competition. It may be shown as the winner, but since it only had itself to compete against, it doesn’t make sense to show that. |
| Pioneer | The first occurrence of a technical milestone, for example using two channels of digi for the first time. Got any ideas for other milestones? |
| Delay | It takes a few seconds before the SID starts. Particularly good to use for BASIC tunes that has to calculate something first. |
| Newcomer | Often accompanies the “First” tag and indicates this is a new kid on the block. If the “First” tag is missing, it’s not certain whether it’s also the first tune. |
Nice fixes and updates – the tags certainly are useful, so thumbs up and thanks for your hard work!
Thanks, Vandahlia.