| CD Mix Arranger | 1 | 2 |
Like many people, I enjoy taking all my CDs that only have one or two songs I like and throwing them onto a single "mix" CD. Sometimes a bit of planning is in order, if there's more music than can fit on a single CD. To complicate matters more, I tend to be somewhat anal about the order the songs are in. To arrange the tracks for these CDs, I typically used Excel. However, this is a slow, bloated program with a crappy interface, and terrible handling of minute-second times. There had to be something better. I figured there were bound to be countless shareware programs that could do this for me, but honestly, it would probably take me more time to find them, install them, learn how to use them, evaluate them, then deinstall the ones I didn't like than it would for me to write my own.
And so I have.
After all the work I did on my Scotland Photo Journal, I found myself getting really hooked on JavaScript as a language. The "CD Mix Arranger" was a perfect application for the language, so I gave it a shot. After getting to a certain point, I realized that there were a few key features I needed -- like beineg able to print out the results -- that I couldn't do in JavaScript. I'd always wanted to take a stab at learning PHP, so I tried a bit of that, too. The result - after only three days - is provided here.
Now that it's done, there's no reason it can't be shared by others, so try it out and let me know what you think! There are still a couple of minor UI limitations that may or may not be fixable -- I'm still looking into it. For the technically-inclined geeks, the JavaScript code is laced with comments (reminders to myself, really), so if you're curious to see what I hate about Netscape and MSIE this week, feel free take a peek.