These are some of the most frequent questions I get in my mailbox. As a special bonus, there are even answers here!
The official ftp site for WorkMan is ftp.midwinter.com. Check there to see if there's a more recent version than the one you're using. The version number can be found in the About popup.
A couple of drives, for instance the Toshiba XM-3401, are capable of reading digital audio data from the CD over the SCSI bus. A future release of WorkMan will support playing audio through the computer's speaker on such drives.
The window size changes as the program displays different track titles and other things. If you start the program with the "-geometry" option and give a negative number for the Y coordinate, the bottom of the window will be fixed in place and the controls won't move around. Note that you should specify only the window position, and not the size. For example,
workman -geometry -0-500
would pop the window up on the right side of the screen, about halfway up (on screens of typical resolution.) "-0-0" will put the window slightly off the bottom of the screen because there's no way to tell how tall the window manager's decorations are. Play with the numbers until the WorkMan window pops up where you want it; under olwm version 3, "-0-38" will put the window in the lower right corner.
The -background option, you've probably noticed, doesn't work as expected
on XView programs. What you need to do is set the
OpenWindows.windowColor X resource to the color you want.
You can do that without touching other XView applications by doing it on
WorkMan's command line using the -xrm option, e.g.
workman -xrm "OpenWindows.windowColor: skyblue"
Not yet. A few people are working on one, among them <Steve.Tom@eng.sun.com>. The idea is that you'll be able to choose between XView and Motif at compile time (or, if you have both, at runtime.) The Motif interface will become part of the standard source distribution when it's ready.
There is a bug in XView 3.0 (fixed in 3.0.1 and higher) that causes the library to lose a little bit of memory whenever an image is destroyed. Unfortunately, this happens twice a second while the About popup is displayed. If the About popup is left up overnight, the program can get bigger than you might expect. WorkMan doesn't update the About popup unless it's actually displayed onscreen, so unpin (dismiss) it when you're not using it and the program will stop growing.
There are several special symbols you can put into a track title to alter aspects of the main window's display. The most important is "//" (two forward slashes in a row.) This splits the title up into segments. Usually, each segment is displayed on its own line in the main window; a common use is to enter titles that are too big to fit on one line. For instance, you might enter a title like:
The really really really really really//really really really long song
That would add a second line of track title information to the main window, with the text after the "//"; the text before "//" would go on the first line of the window. The "//" itself is never displayed. If you leave out the "//" and just enter the long song title, the program will do its best to break the title into separate segments automatically.
If a segment starts with "+", the rest of the text in the segment is displayed in place of the disc name on the main window. This is most often used when several tracks are related in some way (such as movements of a symphony.) For example, you might enter:
+Symphony No. 2, op. 40//Allegro assai
That title line has two segments. The second segment is displayed as the track title. Since the first segment begins with "+", the CD's title is replaced with "Symphony No. 2, op. 40" while the track in question is playing.
As a shortcut, if a segment contains only a "+" character and nothing else, the "+" segment from the previous track is used. So you might have a group of tracks labeled:
+Piano concerto in G//Allegro
+//Andante
Presto//+
+//Allegro assai - Andante -//Moderato marcato
The third line is to demonstrate that the order of segments isn't important; "+" can come anywhere. The fourth track has the "Piano concerto in G" title, as well as a two-line track title.
If you're not sure what the result will look like when you enter a title with several segments, just click on the track's selector button on the main window and the title will be displayed, even if the CD isn't playing.
Yes, using the same facilities described above. There is a second special character that can come at the front of a segment, "@". It causes the artist name on the main window display to be replaced with the rest of the text in the segment while the track in question is playing.
"@" behaves in much the same way as "+" (e.g. if it's alone in a segment, the previous track's "@" segment is used.)
A compilation CD's track titles might look like this:
@Charles Gounod//+Ballet music from "Faust"//Allegretto
@//+//Adagio
@//+//Allegretto
@//+//Moderato maestoso
@//+//Moderato con moto
@//+//Allegretto
@//+//Allegro vivo
@Friedrich Smetana//Symphonic poem "The Moldau"
@Anton Dvorak//Slavonic Dance No. 2 in E minor
@Adolphe Adam//Overture from "If I were King"
Nope. It isn't. The MiniDisc format from Sony puts track information on the disc, but regular CDs don't contain a human-readable table of contents. So until WorkMan is extended to support MiniDisc players, you're stuck typing names in.
Sometimes you'll put in a CD, and the program won't recognize it even though you know you saw it in the database. What's likely happening is that you have a different pressing (publication run) of the CD than the person who entered it into the database. As I understand it, when they want to make more copies of a CD, they produce a new pressing master from the audio tape. Unfortunately, the track timings are different by a fraction of a second (or more) when they do that. WorkMan uses these timings with a range of 75 frames (= one second) to identify a disc. Try the -f option to adjust the range in which workman matches the timings. Be careful: If you use very large values, some CDs may not be identified correctly. This option has no effect if you have special pressings of the same discs with and without some bonus tracks.
If a CD isn't matched exactly, WorkMan adds a line "Probably:" above the track title.
If you're running Solaris, you're trying to start WorkMan while "vold", the Solaris volume manager, has control of the drive. See the Solaris 2 release notes for more information.
As far as I could examine, this is a Solaris driver issue. I fear that I cannot do anything about it.
If you recompile WorkMan without that option, it ought to work better.
If you find an answer to your problem, though, by all means tell me about it so I can add it to this page and save someone else some time.