People who downloaded the album ranking program I wrote will know that the algorithm works, but it's time consuming to use and has bugs. So I thought I'd make a thread for bugs that need fixing, and suggestions for improvement. Here are things I already plan to do.

-Some places it asks for numbers, if you give letters it will crash

-Some places it asks for input, if you hit return without entering anything it crashes or enters an infinite loop

-Entering albums is time consuming, so I will make it so you can continuously enter albums with one line each until you say 'done'

-Add a 'help' option that will explain things that are confusing

-Add an 'edit album' function

-Right now, entering album titles with hyphens or backslashes creates major problems with data storage. I need to fix that somehow.

Anything else people have noticed or suggestions people have are welcome.

I'd love to get this program! Where can I download it?

Moonbeam, read all about it here:

http://pub37.bravenet.com/forum/3172289350/show/938344

BillAdama, I didn't try out the program for a while now, but the bug fixes regarding the crashes are really welcome. Your other improvements sound good as well.

Will let you know my impressions, as soon as I have done further testing.

Before I was only using the program for 2008 albums, now I'm trying to introduce a list of hundreds of my all time favorites.

So, this program is about to get tested as to how it handles huge lists over a long time.

One problem I'm having now is getting the ones from 2008 to get scored below the all time favorites, but I'm sure once a larger number of comparisons are made between the two groups it'll sort out.

Here are some more ideas I got for the program.

-Instead of 'load albums' and 'clear loaded albums', when you load have an option to start with a clean list or add more to the ones you've already loaded.

-A function that checks for cycles (I know just how to do this, but it's a long and tedious implementation, so this might not show up till way later).

-For suggesting new matchups, have something that lets you choose one album to base all the other suggestions on.

Something that would be pretty awesome, would be the ability to import a list of albums (in a predetermined format) from Excel. Is that possible at all? With CSV or something?

For that to be possible I'd have to know how to read Excel files directly, which I don't.

However, doing it from a text file is easy. That's already pretty much how data is stored, I'd just have to adjust it so you can write a text file, enter the name of the text file and add it.

If you don't mind delimiting entries with ugly semicolons or something.

Actually, come to think of it, I could probably also design an HTML page that would let you add data through text fields.

One more improvement I thought of earlier. For purposes of searching through data, have it ignore everything but letters and numbers, and also ignore leading 'The's.

So, if you had an album stored with the band name 'The Beatles', you could enter B&^&^eATl**'''eS, and it would match any 'The Beatles' albums.

I have my own list-making program that I created using the free statistical package R. You can import your list from Excel saved as a text file with it too. Unfortunately, I've had to enter all of the albums as "Artist- Album" for it to work, but once that was done, it's come along ok.

I'll take a look at the other thread and see if I can help with the importing.

Well, I'm not familiar with java, so I'm afraid I've got nothing to offer.

Fixing backslashes should be easy. I just have to omit them from the file name.

In the first version, it will save Elliot Smith - Either/Or as "Elliot SmEither/Or.alb". Then later when it tries to access that file, it will look for a file called "Or.alb" in a directory called "Elliot SmEither" which does not exist.

For hyphens the problem is more that I used hyphens as a field separator, so if you try to search for "B-52s", it will look for an album called "52s" by a band called "B".

So the trick is finding a field separator that doesn't show up in band and album names, but that isn't as ugly as a semicolon.

How do you export Excel files into a text file? Can you do it from an external program or do you just have to do it from Excel? And can you tell it what delimiters to use? That would already work, if you can get it to put semicolons between fields.

If you all don't mind dealing with ugly formatting, you can just open up the albummasterlist.txt file that gets created when you save, and then enter more albums directly, copying the format you see it use. (One thing worth mentioning though, January = 0, December = 11.)

I forget if I fixed that problem before or after I put up the program. At one point, if you entered '5' for May, it would add 5 into the data, then later read it as 'June', which would sometimes result in results coming up with negative weights.

You can do it from Excel by going to "Save as" and selecting a text file (.txt extension). I'm not sure if you can select the delimiter. It uses the TAB key as a default...

Now having checked, I don't think there's a way to choose the delimiter.

Okay. Here's what I can do. Make a shell script that will translate tab characters into semicolons. Then, people can use Excel files and then just run the shell script.

Change of plans. I just came up with a drastic simplification of the formula that does almost the exact same thing.

Plus I'm learning things like SQL and PHP, so now I'm thinking instead of just revamping this version, I'll do a complete revamp and put it on the web.

Maybe I can finagle it into being my final project for the class I'm in too.

You can save an Excel file as a CSV file, which allows you to easily import them in MySQL. It'll put semicolons in between every tab in the Excel file.