How many tapes do you have? Do you spend more time managing your tape lists than actually listening to that crispy new spin? Have you ever been so awash in impending trades that one or more fell through the cracks? Does your handwriting look worse than your local Doctor? As long as you have a personal computer running windows, you needn't enter a 12 step program for itinerant tapers. Let a computer program make sense of your mess.
There are two popular windows packages available to help automate the tape collecting and trading process. The older of the two, and showing its age, is WinDead version 3. The upstart WInTaper, more limited than WinDead in some areas, is a windows native, and it shows.
Since you'll probably be spending a lot of time in these programs, the interface is particularly important. And here is where Mike Geier's $65 WinDead really shows its age. WinDead started out as a DOS program, written in one of the dBase variants, FoxPro. And the DOS legacy shows. While the modern graphica interface uses drop-down boxes, pick lists, buttons and separately selectable overlapping Windows, WinDead simply paints big ugly boxes on the screen. The thoroughly up-to-date application ought to be navigable by mouse only; the keyboard should be used only for entering data. WinDead forces you to the keyboard to select where a report should print and what song to search for.
WinTaper on the other hand, sports a fully modern windows interface. The main screen includes an icon bar, and a user sortable list of all the shows in your collection. Tape detail, including song lists and other data, is readily accesible by double-clicking on the show entry, using a toolbar icon, or through a pull-down menus. WInTaper, by contrast, barely makes use of pull-down menus at all.
Wintaper builds a handy list of songs dynamically from your tapes, so searching for a song is easy to do. I'd like to see this dynamic list taken a step further, however, so that when songs are entered into a show, an intelligent auto-fill (like in the financial software Quicken) will offer the most likely fit.
WinTaper is much easier to navigate for the Windows user, but the Dos user just making the big Windows transition may be confused by all the icons, menus and list choices. But for day to day use, WinTaper's interface definately has the edge.
A pretty face is nice, of course, but the underlying functionality, like show creation, printing reports and tape covers, etc, is what really counts. And each program fits different needs. Entering a new show in WinTaper is relatively straightforward, simply pressing the Add button, using a menu or the Insert key, a tape detail screen comes up. WinTaper only allows a for two tapes to be associated with a show, and only 17 songs per tape. Longer tapes require extending both tape windows into a single tape.
With WinDead, entering a new show is not so easy. To create a new show, you first have to select the My Tapes button. That brings up an ugly and unintuitive window, where you enter in the tape date. Pressing the add button creates a new show, and then add again checks to see if that tape is on your list.
At this point, WinDead then offers its one truly redeemable and unique feature. The program contains complete set lists from almost every show the boys have played. In WinTaper you are forced to enter in the set list for each show you own, entering in songs over and over. WinDead, however, goes out to that database and autofills the songs with a good guess at what songs go to which tape in a show set. Another button lets you peruse that list, deleting missing songs, and adding in filler.
WinTaper makes extensive use of drop-down boxes for adding in tape data like set, quality, media, tape length and source. This means that your ratings and other data are consistent from entry to entry. WinDead, on the other hand, provides free-form entry for that data. That's nice if you want to rate your tapes on a non-standard scale using words like Smokin', Trippy and Wowza, but if you forget those categories you could end up with a different category for each tape. You'll also have to type those categories in again, and again, and again, and again. Finally, those categories might mean something to you, but others will be clueless. The WinTaper method is far preferrable.
Wintaper also lets you add in additional information about song transitions, like cut, jam (or into), transition and footnotes. The version of WinTaper I looked at did have a few irritating limitations, requiring the show to be saved when tape data is added or updated, for instance, and requiring navigating some confusing dialog boxes. But the range of show data supported, including source, tape length and generation, along with the ease of entry make WinTaper preferrable to WinDead. Unless, of course, you have a large number of shows to enter, and really don't want to type in the songs over and over again. That ease of entry, however, is still overshadowed by the difficulty of manipulating the data once entered.
Both programs give you control over most aspects of the printing, including fonts, footnotes and personal information. Both programs also provide preview modes too. WinDead includes a nice feature that lets you print cute graphics, like a dancing bear or a skateboarding Jerry (seriously!) under the set list. Like with data entry, WinTaper's interface is more windows-normal, making it easier to use. WinDead's interface forces you to the keyboard, and is much more limited.
Actual tape box covers are relatively similar, with the WinDead's added graphics capability a plus. But WinDead has the annoying tendency to print tape label outlines just slightly larger than the tape box itself. So when cutting the label out, you have to slice slightly inside the lines, rather than right on top of them. WinTaper, on the other hand, gets the dimensions just right.
WinTaper also does a much better job when it comes to creating a tape list to distribute either on-line or via hard-copy. Where WinDead forces you to use their format, WinTaper allows each of five fields to be custom selected from any of the available data describing the show. The program still defaults to field order for sorting, something that ought to be changed in future versions.
WinDead does have two very unique features that may make it appropriate for some users. The aforementioned comprehensive Grateful Dead show and song listing, from 1966 through early 1994 is invaluable, even all by itself. And if you do a lot of trading, the difficult to use Trader section of WinDead will be a godsend.
The Trading section lets you define trading partners, including the standard name and address data, along with a freeform data-entry box where you can enter in tapes already traded, or under way. While a nice feature, it would be far more valuable if it could cross-reference tapes traded and promised with your personal tape list. A link between tapes received and traders would be great too, especially when you want to determine just who's given you the best shows over the years. Given that many of us trade electronically, an e-mail function would nicely complement the printed mailing labels WinDead generates.
WinDead also includes a handy text file containing the complete GDTS mail-order information, an invaluable resource for anyone.
WinTaper does a much better job working with non Grateful Dead tapes. With WinTaper they are just another show in the list, while WinDead seems to want to keep them separate. In addition, WinTaper lets you load and store multiple named files, while the file structure in WinDead is more cryptic. Rather than trade lists, I've already started trading WinTaper .WTF files electronically. Better than a tape list, with the program file I get all the critical information about songs, length and source.
I found both programs extremely easy to install, but others have had trouble with WinDead. Clearly these programs require at least a 486 with preferrably 8 megabytes or more of memory.
Each of these programs has a few bugs or limitations, but while the problems were relatively easy to get around in WinTaper, WinDead's problems grew incresingly irritating.
WinDead has a few drop dead problems, like when you hit
But my real complaint with WinDead is the kludgey and frankly
ugly user-interface. The colors are horrible (some text in the Taper
section was virtually unreadable). Running the program at anything but
full screen mode almost guarantees that a window will get lost, obscuring
data. The character-based roots of the program show through, making it
far less usable than WinTaper.
Pricing and distribution are the biggest differentiators between
the two products. WinTaper is available in a shareware form, meaning
that you can download it and try it for free. If you like it, you are
morally (and legally) obliged to send the author $25, although only about
75 of the approximately 2000 users have actually registered the code.
Author Dan Tepper (CIS: 75103,2616) plans a new release with additional
features that will be available only to registered users.
WinDead, on the other hand, costs $60 and has no guarantees,
either implied or specific. Author Mike Geier (CIS: 71155,3530) refuses
to give money back to unsatisfied customers. I've been in contact with
frustrated WinDead users that simply cannot get the program to run, and
are essentially out significant coin. Geier's stance on returns and
copyright infringement is particularly intriuging, given that the About
window in his program lists another person, one Benjamin C. Tseng, from
StaffSoft Corporation as holding the copyright to his development
environment, FoxPro for Windows. Curious, isn't it?
Bottom Line: If you absolutely need the complete show list
database and trader functionality, then WinDead is the way to go.
WinTaper is the much better choice for all the rest of us. At least
until WinDead gets a major overhaul in functionality, look and feel, and
attitude. Or WinTaper incorporates a show database and taper section.
Oh, and do decide to use WinTaper, please register it. It's the decent
and moral thing to do.
The author is Executive Director of PC Week Labs, and interprets the
computer world for fun and profit.
copyright Universal Knickers, 1995. Feel free to circulate freely...