Titlestrips..

I'm familiar with the free (and paid) titlestrip websites out there, and recently as I was trying them out, I got agitated by them. Specifically the lack of centering (my OCD had a field day with this..!), lack of being able to select styles/colors on record (instead all pages have the same color/style), entering more than 20, properly right-justifying label text, and not letting text run OUTSIDE of the strip..

This is an example of the lack of centering that drove me crazy:


So, as I program web-based applications and interactive websites for a living, I figured I could do it better myself. I know SVG (vector art format), so for the last four months, about 10 hours a week on my daily commute to my office, I've been working on a website where I could enter my record info in, and select which ones I get titlestrips for.

At first, it didn't have a real good UI (and frankly, while it looks messy to you now, with things not lined up or centered, it was a LOT worse before), and I wanted to change some stuff around, so at this time, I ended up with this.

Here's a screen showing all the 45's I have in the system:

If you double-click on a record, you can pull up its details. The first two tabs contin information about the record, and any additional collection information:



But the real reason I was doing this was so I could print out labels. So the last tab lets me define what the record's label will look like:


While it's not noticeable, I put most of my work in the code that generates that titlestrip. It handles double-artists on the fly (either adding a " / " between the two, or making them two lines based on layout, see below), and will automatically shrink the font-size or word-wrap to two lines and shrink to make the song fit and not run outside the boundaries. I made a lot of colors (some I ripped from online strip generators, one or two I made myself), and even added images to the selection boxes:


Code was added to generate selected records and add them to a page (with cut-lines! ), then combine all the pages into a PDF. That was about it, until I realized that some of my records I had entered incorrectly - Side A was Side B, and vice-versa. So, easy fix - I added a couple dialogs to allow me to query Discogs to query for matching entries, and import information if you want:



At this point, I was finished .. with extras.. of everything I had wanted to do. However, I kept going, for some crazy reason. I started working on adding user support (i.e. support multiple users). I stopped mid-way, since I highly doubt anyone would be using this, other than myself.

But wanted to share, since I got the darn text centered:

That I essentially spent far, FAR too long doing something that.. really didn't need to be done.

Someone smarter than me should write a program for this forum that uses a saved online database to make title strips. You start typing the title and it searches as you type. When correct title pops up you click it and rest of info is filled in. If title doesn't exist, your new info is stored in the database for others to use. Would be a good website idea.

eddie wrote:Someone smarter than me should write a program for this forum that uses a saved online database to make title strips. You start typing the title and it searches as you type. When correct title pops up you click it and rest of info is filled in. If title doesn't exist, your new info is stored in the database for others to use. Would be a good website idea.

Wouldn't be that hard to do. My code is written for IIS/.NET, but the SVG part of it is just that.. SVG/XML, so generating an 'image out' wouldn't be that difficult to port over to PHP (the code this forum runs on..)

Now I'm REALLY anxious to get the juke back together, so I can actually USE my little webpages and generate titlestrips.

If you had hundreds or thousands using the website, you could build a huge database in no time.

I bought this one from Dennis Downing. Its is very reasonable.
http://www.jukestrips.com/
The only thing I changed was I used Microsoft excel to read the database into it then I can rearrange
per artist or alphabetical and keep a record of it.

I just use GIMP, an open source free alternative to Photoshop.

I made a template of blank title strips, printed them to ensure they are the right size. That template is used to make all my strips. I just add the text and print it.

Canadian wrote:I bought this one from Dennis Downing. Its is very reasonable.
http://www.jukestrips.com/
The only thing I changed was I used Microsoft excel to read the database into it then I can rearrange
per artist or alphabetical and keep a record of it.

I heard of his software, but since I'm a DIY kind of guy (and I already HAD a database of my vinyls), I decided to do it myself.

SteveFury wrote:I just use GIMP, an open source free alternative to Photoshop.

I made a template of blank title strips, printed them to ensure they are the right size. That template is used to make all my strips. I just add the text and print it.

I'm not graphically inclined, admittedly - so when I went about this, making an SVG of the titlestrips (with the various options) was far easier for me. (And, one of the ideas I had toyed with was that since I already have a database of the vinyls, it wouldn't be that hard to add tables and specify/keep track of which ones are in the Juke. ..And then, taking it one step further, have the application auto-generate lineups in the juke by sorting, splitting genres, etc.) ..But I never made it that far. Mainly because, well, since I'd be the only one using it, the effort wasn't worth the payoff.