Romcenter

Please help, I have installed rc1 and cannot find the scan window, what am I missing?

Scan window? I'm not sure what you mean. Please take a look at this thread, i've written a short post on how to use RC3, it may help you.

The Scan Window is used to add new rom files, or partial rom files to the database. In previous versions it was accessed via the main "File" menu and it is still reffered to in the help. However when I installed rc1 I could not find anyway of opening the window. So the question is, should the "Scan Window" be available or has it been replaced with an alternative workflow?

Thank you

Never used it, that's why i didn't get it at first. It's not there indeed. I guess Eric should answer your question then...

Thank you, glad it is not just me being thick!

Scan windows is no more available because it was not very usefull.
To add new roms, you can add an 'incoming' folder, or directly your download folder to rc3.
Put your new files in it, select it in rc3 and click the 'refresh' button. The folder will be synchronized and new files added in the database.

Eric,

Thank you, that makes sense.

Have you ever thought of applying the Romcenter technology and approach to managing music collections. If you consider an album to be a zipped set of roms and a track to be a rom you could imagine RC being used to scan through an Itunes libray identifying duplicates and filling in gaps in albums etc. You can even apply the concept of split and merged to variations on albums etc?

Anyway thanks for the response.

The problem with music files is that you can't rely on crc to identify a song. Two mp3 of the same song almost always have different crc.
Mediamonkey is the soft I used to manage musics library and it's very very good.

I agree, but you can use a puid - http://musicbrainz.org/doc/HowPUIDsWork

This could be your way to a comfortable retirement as it would be a much more mainstream usage of the ideas you have developed.

The wiki entry below is a good starting point

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint

Interesting, but trackin 100000 roms is already not easy, just imagine several millions music files...

RomCenter wrote:Scan windows is no more available because it was not very usefull.

I would tend to disagree as I've always considered the scan Window to be the single most useful feature of Romcenter.

RomCenter wrote:To add new roms, you can add an 'incoming' folder, or directly your download folder to rc3.
Put your new files in it, select it in rc3 and click the 'refresh' button. The folder will be synchronized and new files added in the database.

It may add the new files to the database but it won't tell you what files contains roms you didn't already have or move them with your collection. I have my arcade roms split into 3 directories (CPS2, NEOGEO and MAME) and when a new version come out I usually fix the CPS2 and Neogeo directorie first then move on to fixing the Mame files with the rest. I was able to quickly figure out what was new and not already in the other directorie by dropping my downloaded archives in the scan window and having it move those that contained new files. Now if I use Romcenter 3, I'll have to switch back to do all the sorting and moving of files myself. It's still a very useful tool, but a lot less than version 2 was.

Ok, I see the problem.
I have ideas for new features which will allow to do that.

That's great news.

I'm glad to see you're taking your users' need into account. Then again, you were always very receptive back in the days when I was beta testing version 2.

Thank you.
Unfortunatly, there is a lot of things I want to do, and so little time...