PLSTsearch v1.1 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ - by Ola Ekström (c) 1999 - - Developed in C using the DICE Freeware compiler - IMPORTANT!: ~~~~~~~~~~~ You use this program totally on your own risk. I am not responsible for anything that this program does to your hardware and/or software. Remember that it is always a healthy thing to make backups of your data on a regular basis. PLSTsearch is Freeware, this means that it may be distributed and used freely, but it may not be sold for money. What is PLSTsearch and how do I use it? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ PLSTsearch is a search-tool for plst-files (also known as Preset-lists) produced by Protracker and it's close relatives on Amiga compatible computers. It can only be run from the CLI/Shell and use this command format: PLSTsearch [search-string]. You must replace with the full path to where your plst is stored. Directories defined by the path command will not be checked. You will have to replace [search-string] with any string that you would like to search the plst for. I.e. if you search for "snare", PLSTsearch will report back all entries found with where "snare" is part of the name. If you don't specify a search-string, the whole plst will be listed. If a match is found, PLSTsearch will print the name of the sample, the disk it is stored on, the length of the sample, the finetune value and its repeat and replen offsets. Unlike Protracker and friends this information is displayed in decimal format. PLSTsearch does not support wild-cards or other advanced forms of searching at the moment. If your searchstring contains spaces you must enclose it within quotation marks. Like this: "string.with a.space.in.it". Why? ~~~~ Why write a program like this, you might ask yourself. The plst is already arranged in alphabetical order... Well, that is true, but when your plst grows bigger, it will be harder and harder to remember the names of individual samples. If you have 30 snare-drum samples called things like: bigsnare, smallsnare, shortsnare etc. it will not help you very much if they are listed alphabeticaly. My plst contains about 600 entries and I don't think it's very large, yet it's hard to locate things sometimes. I can imagine how hard it would be to find one's way around a plst with a couple of 1000 entries. If you only remember a part of a name or want to list samples of a special type, you can use PLSTsearch. News for version 1.1 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ PLSTsearch now displays all data available in each record, except the volume byte. I understand that you can't save volume on any freestanding sample, it is only saved in the modules, so this byte is always set to $40 in the plst. I also changed the memoryhandling so that the program doesn't use the disk so much. Last Words: ~~~~~~~~~~~ For this version of PLSTsearch I supply the sources with the rest of the program. This is because I got such a nice e-mail from a dutch genleman asking me to make the sources available so that the programs stored on AmiNet could be compiled and used on 'the new Amiga', whatever that is... That gave me a reason to dig up the old Amiga 500 from the closet it was in, and while I was at it, I thought that I might just as well tidy up the 1.0 sources a bit. Thats why I make a new release instead of just releasing the sources for the 1.0 version. So, now everyone can make any changes they want to the program (why not write a nice GUI for it?). If you do make any changes and spread them it would be nice if you gave me credit for the original program. PLSTsearch doesn't use any Amiga specific code, so it might be posible to port it to other platforms. I have seen tracker-clones on the Atari ST for instance, maybe it can be used there as well. I would like to say thanks to everyone that makes software that works on an Amiga 500 / MC68000 system! If you want to contact me for bug reports or just to tell me what you think of the program, I can be reached by e-mail on the following address: knaster74@hotmail.com I hope you will find PLSTsearch usefull! / Ola Ekström, January 17 1999.