Exporting and Importing Data

VisiTrax provides two distinct methods for porting data to or from other applications. Each method has its distinct advantages.

In most situations, the method of choice will be copying and pasting data, using the Windows clipboard as an intermediate holding buffer. This method has two key advantages:

•	The data is represented as a simple table, compatible with Microsoft Excel and similar spreadsheet programs.

•	Use of the clipboard is much simpler and more foolproof than saving to a file or reading from a file.

The second available method is saving and reading the library data as a text file. This method may be more advantageous in the following situations:

•	Consolidating or renaming artists, media formats, categories, and the like

This entails saving your VisiTrax library as a text file, editing the file with a text editor, then reading the edited file back into VisiTrax. It's particularly efficient because text files saved from VisiTrax list distinct names of artists, et al, in sorted order. (Note that reading text files is much slower than reading .trx files, so you'll normally want to save your data in the standard .trx file form.)

•	Developing special data conversion utilities

Sometimes the only practical way to port data from another application is by writing a special data conversion utility. In such cases, the data is often organized as two linked tables, one for albums (volumes) and one for songs (tracks), making generation of a VisiTrax-readable text file a very straightforward operation.

While the text file format provides a much more efficient data representation compared to the tabular form used by copy and paste, it's generally a more complex layout.