ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN MICROPENDIUM P.O. Box 1343 Round Rock TX 78680 Phone 512-255-1512 Internet jkoloen@io.com MICRO REVIEWS for November 1993 Micropendium by Charles Good CARD FILE by Bill Gaskill There are many data base programs, some full featured and very complex and some simple and easy to use. Card File is in the simple easy category. It is written in extended basic with 40 column assembly support and simulates a paper index card collection with "cards" that have information on both sides of the card. Card File loads from a SSSD disk. Drive number and printer defaults can easily be altered. You are presented with a freeform data entry screen on which you can type data any way you want. There is a text mode for data entry and a command mode. Text mode allows full screen cursor movement. Word wrap is included (coded in XB so it is a little slow) as well as the ability to add solid vertical and horizontal lines to divide your card into sections and make it look good. Command mode lets you delete single lines or the whole screen, insert lines, display either "side 1" or "side 2" of your index card, print both sides of the card (direct screen dump or in a report format), save the card, load an existing card for viewing, display a disk directory, or bring up the on line help. I've said it before and I'll say it again: "all software should have on line help screens" for those of us who don't remember all the commands. Card File lets you load in templates, fill in the templates with your own custom data and save these filled cards back using other file names. This template concept is very handy, and Card File comes with a bunch of templates to get you started. These include part of a multi year calendar, employee personnel record, auto insurance, birthday list, TI cartridge data sheet, personal information, phone list, golf score record, recipe, personal references, a "to do list", personal weight record, and motor vehicle service record. These templates are blank, waiting for you to enter the data. Other useful "cards" that come with Card File already have useful data, such as help screens for several TI word processors. Card File is NOT a full featured data base, but it is nice for those with a minimal expansion system. You can't sort and you can't search. All you can do is find card files from a disk directory, load the card to display and alter the data, then print and/or resave the data. Card File's cards are saved as DV80 text files, and that is the key to Card File's usefulness. In my opinion, Bill Gaskill's card templates and word processing help screens are worth more than the software he has created to manipulate the cards. You can load any of the cards or handy blank card templates into an ordinary word processor for easy viewing and editing. I find this procedure quicker than using the Card File software itself, because text editing from a word processor at assembly speed is faster and usually more convenient. For searching you can use Funnelweb's Disk Review or Birdwell's DSKU to quickly search a whole disk full of card files for key words. You can also quickly view a disk full of cards with Disk Review's V(iew) option. Bill offers at extra cost two "libraries" of filled data cards. One is if interest to TI history buffs such as myself and the other has broad general interest. The CARTRIDGE LIBRARY is based on Bill's extensive TI command module collection. Cartridge name, product number, type, date released, manufacturer, release price, and additional notes are included for each cartridge of the cartridge library. Of particular interest are the actual dates acquired and actual price paid for the cartridges Bill has. The STATES card library is really interesting. I recommend its purchase to anyone. This information was apparently obtained from a good very recent atlas. I have a similar STATES data base on my home MS-DOS machine's hard drive and I paid more for that than Bill is asking for his STATES library. Each state card has the following information: total land area, highest point, lowest point, record high and low temperatures, list of natural resources, percent of land area that is federal, number of hazaderous waste sites, 1990 population and percent change since 1980, population density, per capita cost of public education, average pupil/teacher ratio, annual deaths from cancer heart disease and homicide each per 100000, date and order of admission to union, capital, governor, electroal votes, number of congressional representatives, average federal income tax per capita, number of police officers and lawyers per resident, per capita income, number of farms radio and TV stations and daily newspapers, area of national parks, and phone number of tourist board. This is useful interesting information. Card File is fairware. If you just want to try it out I will send it to you for $1. Better yet, send a fairware donation of any amount plus a disk and paid return mailer directly to Bill. The Cartridge and States libraries are not fairware. They are only available directly from Bill for $7 each, which includes the SSSD disk and postage. Bill Gaskill 2310 Cypress Ct., Grand Junction CO 81506 ------------------------- AUDIO CALCULATOR by Larry Tippett There are lots of "me too" applications and games in the TI world, software that does the same things as previously available software. Newer software may be faster, more user friendly, or just slightly different, but the game formats and types of applications don't seem to change much. It isn't often that you find software that does something new and different, a type of computer task that nobody thought of before. Audio Calculator is new and different. Audio Calculator is for use by those who transfer music from CDs and phonograph records to cassette tapes. The software will calculate (with emphasis on the work "calculate") the maximum number of song titles that will fit on each side of an audio cassette tape and then to print a tape box label. Yes I know. There are several public domain cassette tape box label printing programs, and Bruce Harrison's Time Calc program can be used to accurately add up the cumulative elapsed times of songs you add consecutively to an audio tape. Audio Calculator is different. It actually calculates the ideal fit of songs onto both sides of an audio cassette of any length so that you can squeeze the maximum number of songs onto the tape without leaving out part of the last song and with minumum unused tape time at the end of the tape. You start out by inputting into the computer a tape title and date (or other information in place of the date such as artist). Then you enter the titles and durations of all the songs you want to squeeze onto your tape. Duration information can be read directly from a CD player or found on the CDs documentation. You are than asked for an "autospace", a soundless time interval you will insert between songs. The default of 4 seconds usually works well. Finally you enter the tape length (eg. enter "90" for a C90 tape), and Audio Calculator begins to calculate. You are presented on screen with a suggested list of songs (title and individual durations) for side 1 and 2 of the tape, a statement of total used and unused time (after the last time) on each side, and a listing of which songs will NOT fit on the tape. At this point you have the opportunity to edit your song entries. Maybe you have a lot of room left and want to put more songs onto the tape. Or maybe you really want to put some of the "won't fit" songs onto the tape and must delete some of the fitted songs to make room. When you are finished editing, Audio Calculator will recalculate based on your new data. As an example of what can be done; I took a favorate CD and typed in the names and durations of all its 13 songs, specified a 4 second "autospace" and a C30 (15 minutes on each side) tape length. Audio Calculator told me it could put 6 of my songs on each side of the tape with unused time of 29 seconds on side 1 and 45 seconds on side 2. One song with a duration of 3 minutes 24 seconds would not fit. When everything is set up as you wish you can print either a full 80 column listing or a cassette label to cut out and put in the cassette box. Each printout includes the tape title and date plus information about song duration and unused tape space. There is room on a label for a maximum of 25 songs per tape side. Then comes the hard part. You have to manually use your audio equipment to transfer music onto the tape in the sequence specified by Audio Calculator, which is not necessarily the same sequence you used to input the son titles. Don't forget to manually leave the "autospace" between songs. Wouldn't it be nice if this could be done automatically under computer control! Audio Calculator is written in extended basic and comes in 40 and 80 column versions both of which come on the same SSSD disk and are almost functionally identical. The 80 column version (requires a Geneve or a 99/4A 80 column device such as TIM or AVPC) is written using Alexander Hulpke's X80. I am grateful for another really useful 80 column application for my 99/4A. There arn't many of them. I highly recommend Audio Calculator to anyone who makes backup cassette music tapes. It is fairware, and the requested donation is only $5. If you just want to try it out before sending Larry his money, I will send it to you if you mail me a buck (pays for the disk and return postage). Why not save some time and postage by getting it directly from the author. Send the $5 fairware donation AND a disk with paid return mailer to Larry Tippett, 5826 Buffalo St., Sanborn NY 14132. --------------- It has been 10 years since "Black Friday", and the Micro Reviews column is proof that new really useful software is still being created for our trusty old 99/4A. Please continue to send new material my way for a quick Micro Review. My address is P.O. Box 647, Venedocia OH 45894. My evening phone is 419-667-3131.