Karaoke Forums

I use compuhost. There is a great feature in it that allows you to print out song lists without duplicates. Now of course the manus are not very good at getting the song titles exactly correct. Using periods and hyphens in the incorrect spot or not using them or using them. Or using diffferent names such as Tom Petty vs. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers vs Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and,,,,, well you all know the dilemma. Don't forget "The Beatles" vs "Beatles".
So I have painstakingly gone through my songs on FastTracks and fixed everything I can see. It really makes the book look so much more professional and is less confusing. Oh did I add Grease vs Olivia and John vs John and Olivia,,,,?

Now what I need is to be able to eliminate duplicates in my exported excel list so I can post it on my web site without dupes and also know exactly how many songs I have not counting dupes and vocals. I don't want to do it by hand.
I'm pretty handy with excel but not THAT handy. Anyone know of a feature in excel that will allow me to choose a specific column to delete dupes? Of course I have to complicate it a bit as I don't want to delete a dupe song name if it is offered by two different performers such as Crazy, Blue, Tainted Love, etc. What say ye?

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

I have two Perl scripts I use. One is an artist adjuster, that standardizes artists. The other is a dup-deleter that will delete dupes for the same artist.

If you sent me the file via email to files@duxmail.com, I'd be happy to eliminate the dups for you. I could also standardize the artists if you want. (I use Last, First and Beatles, The).

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[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

get primopdf and you can use the list that Fast Tracks puts out in PDF format. It acts like a printer you just assign it as the printer you want to use. www.primopdf.com

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The Line Array Experiment is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

mcky, will it take out the vocals records as well? Your formating is exactly how I format mine.

Danny, I will look into your suggestion.

Thanks guys.

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

When you use last name first, do you do Petty, Tom and the Heartbreakers or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers when he is with the Heartbreakers and Petty, Tom when he solos? How about when it comes to something like The Charlie Daniels Band? Is it, Daniels, Charlie Band, The? Or Charlie Daniels Band, The. Then if he solos he is under Daniels, Charlie?

I get so inconsistant with this that I want to switch to First Name First just to eliminate the confusion and put the soloists and the solo plus band all in one place. But some argue that people just don't look up by first name. Yet Chartbuster lists their artists via first name. first Aye aye aye.

Micky--does your program let you pick which dupes to eliminate? Like when you replace an SGB with a Zoom or something? It sounds like a great convenience to have it standardize the artists as I am still finding we have duplicates because of the "&" vs "and" thing causing the titles to be alphabetized differently. Or even N*S*y*N*C* or however it goes vs. NSYNC.

Will sound silly but I usually go with what Wikipedia has for the band or artist. As for your other question, an example would be John Mellencamp. I decided just to use John Mellencamp even though he has been Johnny Cougar, John Couger, John Couger Mellancamp and John Mellencamp.

When an artist breaks off and goes solo, whatever songs were from solo days, stay under his name. For example Bon Jovi vs Jon Bon Jovi.

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

Petty, Tom & The Heartbreakers

To me, the most important thing is being consistant. Even that can be difficult at times.

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

Yeah, I did that a while back. What a pain, and there are still errors. And now I've got to do the same for song names for the same reason. I eliminated the dupes in my book back in April when I reprinted. Went from 255 pages to 180!!

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Good music, good friends, howling good times!

Just sent the file mcky

Compuhost eliminates the duplicates when it prints but you cannot use the listing for anything. I asked them why and they were to pass this along to their IT people.

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

If I want it to. I am the programmer, so it will do whatever I tell it.

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[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I sort of pick in cases like that. But what I do is have an "aliases" feature in my program, so that over time I make it consistent for everything. I use "Petty, Tom" with no Heartbreakers involved at all. I the case of something like Charlie Daniels, because he is a consistent "band" guy, I use "Charlie Daniels Band, The". It makes sense to me, maybe no one else.


I put the two letter thing on a single line, i.e. DK ZM SG. I used to do it with a custom program modifying the RTF file MTU Hoster put out, but the stupid KMA files got to be too much of a pain to deal with so I bought Latshaw's book generator. I could actually send you a book output at the same time, believe it or not, since I have a special program which creates a file tree from the spreadsheet, which you can then read with their book generator.


I have a whole aliases file. Plus I have an aliases regular expression file, which means I can recognize n*s*y*n*c in all capitalizations and do the right thing with them.

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[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Danny I downloaded this and now I have a pdf file. How do I convert to Text tab delimited as that is the format I need to put the non duplicate list on my website.

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

I'm not sure you can do that but couldn't you just load the pdf onto your site? That is what I have on my site is a link to my PDF file that I uploaded to the files section of my webhoster.

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The Line Array Experiment is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

If you have it in an excel format, AND you use Excel 2007, you can automatically dedupe it. Excel 2007 added a deduping feature. The only problem is, you cannot choose which ones to keep and which ones it removes.

If you don't have Excel 2007, you can get most of the features by downloading a free utility called ASAP utilities. It integrates with previous versions of Excel and adds many "power user" features. Just google "asap utilities".

I want to use excel as it allows people to browse thru the music and do searches.

I do have excel 2007 and for the purpose of this list, it doesn't matter to me which version it keeps, I will actually delete that column. How do I proceed?

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

In Excel 2007
Use Remove Duplicates icon
This method is highly destructive! Make a copy of your dataset before you do this!

1. Copy your range of data to a blank section of the worksheet
2. Select a cell in your data set.
3. From the Data ribbon, choose Remove Duplicates.
4. The Remove Duplicates dialog will give you a list of columns. Choose the columns which should be considered. For example, if you needed to remove records where both the artist and song title were identical, check the box for both fields.
5. Click OK.

Excel will delete records from your dataset. It will report that n duplicates were removed and nn records remain.

This is easy to come up with a standard here. As long as the names are of actual band members (and not a made up name), I put the last name of the person first, and follow with the band name. You are correct, this way it keeps together with the artist's solo work.

Seger, Bob and the Silver Bullet Band
Seger, Bob

Hornsby, Bruce and the Range
Hornsby, Bruce

Daniels, Charlie Band, The

Petty, Tom and the Heartbreakers
Petty, Tom

I'll give this a try. Thanks for the help!

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]