Computerized Dee-Jay

My roommate Mark collects “Top 40” singles. He owns over 3,500 45 rpm records. Some were hits as long ago as the 1930s, but most are from the last 20 years. In addition to maintaining this collection for his own enjoyment he uses it to earn money as a dance deejay. He, his sound system, and his 3,500-plus records hire out to dances, parties, and other assorted functions.

Over the years Mark has created a file of his collection using 4-in. by 6-in. index cards. In addition to the title of the record and the artists’ names, these cards contain information about when the record was released, when it entered the top 100, when it dropped from the top 100, the highest position it reached, and cross references of performers who were with other groups. Mark keeps this file in alphabetical order by artists’ name. The file occupies two and a half 15-in. file drawers.

A few months ago Mark created a data base of his collection using The Organizer program from Timex. Although it would be valuable to be able to update and print out the file more easily, his main goal was to be able to search through the date and top position information. Often, when he was playing records at a party a guest would come to him with a request like this: “We graduated from school in 1972. Can you play some songs that were hits that year?”

In the past Mark dealt with these requests from his own knowledge of music. And although this knowledge is amazingly comprehensive, it is not totally complete.

In creating the file Mark realized right away that it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to code 3,500 records into 10,000 bytes of storage space (DIM F$(9999)). He dealt with this problem in the time-honored fashion of deciding to think about it later. In the meantime he resigned himself to storing the information in more than one cassette tape loading.

The next question was how to format the file. He set up the screen rather straightforwardly. The first field contains the artist’s name, the second is a cross reference, when needed, to other groups. Subsequent fields alternate between one with a song title and one containing the year and position information. On his index cards numbers are simply separated by slashes (/). He knew from memory which column contained which piece of information. To make database searches possible he added letter postscripts to the numbers. Without the letter a search for “65” could be inter- preted as “entered chart at 65” when it really meant “released in 1965”. In the data base “65N” means the former and “65Y” the latter.

As it stands the program does the job expected of it. It can search for and find entries by song title, top position, year released, and so on. It can reorder the file by any field and it can be easily updated. The main problem now is that, in order to do a complete search the program must be loaded several times. Each loading contains part of the data base. Mark is currently looking for solutions to this problem.

Here are a few of the solutions under consideration. Reduce the artist’s name entry to a one or two byte number which can then be looked up on an external index. Encode common words such as “love” , “you”, “him”, “her” into a single byte which is decoded and printed correctly on the display. Mark is also looking at various more sophisticated data compression techniques. The last two solutions will, of course, require changes to the Organizer program. But then it’s not written in stone!

Perhaps the ultimate solution to these problems is to add hardware. A 64K RAM, a stringy floppy, or a full-fledged disk drive would do the job easily. But I’d like to think that the first way to solve any problem is through efficient software.

So there’s Mark’s Organizer application. It’s not perfect but then it beats the hell out of those index cards. I’d be real interested to hear about other applications of The Organizer. Write to me care of this publication.