[slinkelist] Some questions/thoughts...

[Jay Pfaffman]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2000 12:46:54 -0500, David Ness <DNess@Home.Com> said:

> Thanks for the try, but what you suggest doesn't solve the problem.
. . .

If I'm not mistaken, your problem is only with the image path.  I've
had no trouble copying the mdb file to another machine, running CDJ on
it to do the cddb lookups & copying the file back.  I think that the
"network neighborhood" solution that someone suggested might work, so
that the path to the image on both machines (given that one is sharing
a drive) would be \\machine\some\path\image.jpg.  My solution been to
run Netscape on one machine to download the images while looking at
CDJ on a VNC window & then dragging the files to the CDJ laptop &
dragging and dropping them all on the CDJ laptop.  Another solution, I
think is to have a local copy all of the image files on both machines.
I agree that none of these solutions is as elegant as the one that you
desire.

> Thank you for the information about the `text database'
> option. Given your description I won't use it, although I find the
> fact that the .mdb has to be converted to use my version of Access
> leaves me in a quandry about whether I can `manage' the data in
> Access and have the results properly reflected in a CDJ-compatable
> data base. On the whole I much prefer text readable data bases,
> unless the amount of data managed is _huge_, so I guess the `step
> forward' into DAO turns out to be a `step backward' to me, but if
> that's the way it is, I guess I better figure out some way around
> it.

I've found that in spite of dire warnings about "if the file isn't
converted you won't be able to modify the database" of Office 2000
(and I think an older version of office as well) I am able to edit the
data in the .mdb file, but am unable to change any fields or perform
useful queries.  Again, it's not as nice as I'd like, but it's still
handy to roll through all of the category fields or artist names in
Access.  And yes, I'd rather do that in emacs, but even for my 400
cds, the mdb format is much faster than the text one was. 

It may also be that if you install a the same version of access on
your CDJ machine as you have on your other machine that CDJ will be
able to read the newer database file.  I think (but don't really know)
that the database calls are all handled by DLLs that come with Access,
so it "should" be able to read mdb files in the newer format. 

-- 
Jay Pfaffman                           pfaffman@relax.com
+1-615-343-1720 (office)               +1-615-460-9299 (home) 
http://relax.ltc.vanderbilt.edu/~pfaffman/