Adding a New Volume

To add a new volume to your library database, select New Volume from the Edit menu, or press Ctrl-N. (In the Volumes view, you can press Insert to do the same thing.) This will present a dialog box similar to the one here:

•	after you select Convert Playlist to Volume from the Edit menu or right-click pop-up menu from the Playlist view (title bar will read Convert Playlist to New Volume).

•	after you click the Add button in the CD Player view, except in that case the dialog looks like this:

At a minimum, the Title, Artist, and Media Format fields (also Category field in the Add New CD dialog) need to be completed to create a valid volume record. You can enter anything you wish for these fields. Each of these fields also contains a drop-down list of entries you've made before.

Hint:

To quickly shift names around in the Artist field, simply double click on that field. For example, this could be used to change "John Smith" to "Smith, John", or vice versa. This feature also works in the Title field.

In the Add New CD dialog, the contents of the Category and Year fields will be assigned to each of the CD's track records. If the tracks have various categories or years, just enter the predominant category and year here, then revise individual track records later on as necessary.

Just to the right of the Media Format field is a

button, which can be used to associate this volume with the currently-loaded CD, or to change or remove a CD association. Clicking on this button will present a short menu of available options. Naturally, a given physical CD should be associated with no more than one volume in your database. Unless you are entering custom CDs, you probably have no need to use this button.

The two optional Notes fields support text of arbitrary length. Both fields show the same information, but merely in different formats. The single-line Notes field lets you select from a drop-down list of all existing volume notes entries, and also can also be useful for entering very brief notes. Typically, these fields are used for miscellaneous information about the volume itself, including physical location or lending information, condition, value, etc. For CDs, these fields map to the CD's Notes field in the CD Player view.

The Location Index field is optional, but strongly encouraged, especially if you use playlists. This provides a concise way to quickly identify each volume. If you've just entered a new media format, assign a two-letter prefix for this field. The prefix you assign here will be applied to all volumes of that same media format. The only limitation is that the prefix can't the same as one used by another media format.

As for the rest of the location code, you can use any number from 1 (or "0001") to 9999, as long as it hasn't already been used for this particular media format. You might want to assign different ranges of numbers to different genres or other discriminators; for example, you might number your CDs as follows:

...and so on. (Note that this is only an example – you can use number ranges any way you want, or not at all.)

If the media format is one you've already been using, VisiTrax will fill in the location index field for you with the first available index number. If want to assign a different index number, just change it.

If you click on the arrow on the right of this field, a drop-down list of available ranges will appear. For example, let's say you've already entered five CD volumes under each of the above example ranges; i.e. 1-5, 1000-1004, 2000-2006, 3000-3004, 4000-4004, and 4500-4504. In that case, the following available ranges would be listed (in this example we're using only whole-numbered locator index values in our library):

Initially, the data field in this example would contain CD0006. Let's say you just bought another Zamfir and His Pan Flute CD, so to select the next available Pan Flute music index, you could pick the fifth entry from the list (CD4005 - 4499). The first index in this range, CD4005, would be transferred to the data field for you.

If the Add New CD dialog's Auto-Eject box is checked, the CD will be ejected upon addition of the new CD entry into the library. When this is used together with the Auto-Detect CDs option (set via the View > Options menu), you can avoid having to manually switch back to the CD Player view for each CD to be added.

Once the needed fields have been filled in, click the Add button to add this new volume entry to the database and begin adding tracks. (If this was an Add New CD dialog, all of the tracks will be added for you at this point.)

If Winamp (v5) is currently running on your PC, and its playlist is not empty, an Import Winamp Playlist checkbox control will appear that the bottom of the Add New Volume dialog, as shown below. To create a new volume containing tracks imported from Winamp's playlist, put a checkmark in the Import Winamp Playlist box before clicking Add.

If the playlist to be imported contains one or more duplicates of tracks already in your library database, VisiTrax will ask if you want to skip the duplicates.

Note 1:

If the Add button's caption is colored dark red, it means at least one data field is incomplete or contains invalid information. Yellow data entry fields mean the same thing. More specific information will be displayed if you click Add in this situation.

Note 2:

Don't forget to save your changes periodically.