workman is a graphical tool for playing audio compact discs on a SunCD drive or other compatible unit. It has most of the features available on standalone CD players, such as a shuffle mode, programmable playlists, and elapsed/remaining timers. But it also has extra features, foremost of which is the ability to store information about CDs in a database, then automatically extract that information when the CD is inserted later. Workman stores the artist's name, the disc title, the names of individual tracks, and even remembers which tracks you don't want to hear! All in an easy-to-use, attractive OPEN LOOK graphical interface.
Its only weakness, in fact, is that this is the end of the Description section of the manpage.
Apply Sun patch 100075 to your system (and your fileserver, if you're NFS-mounting the database files) and you probably won't need to use the -n flag at all.
These signals, in combination with the pidfile (see the -p option description above), allow simple control of the CD player from programs or scripts, and are used by the -s option.
Most controls have spot help; hit the Help key (F1 on type-3 keyboards) over a control to find out what it does. The following is a quick rundown of the controls; for the most part, they're pretty self-explanatory.
The artist's name.
The name of the CD or the title of the currently-playing piece of music, if it takes up more than one track.
The title of the current track. This may occupy more than one row on the screen.
The track selection buttons. Click on these buttons to select a starting track, or to change to a new track if the CD is playing.
The track-position slider. This is updated once every 5 seconds while the CD is playing; you can also use it as a sort of jog dial to move around in a track.
The volume slider. Up is louder; down is quiet.
The main controls (for lack of a better term.) The buttons on the top row move to the previous track, start playing, and move to the next track, respectively. The bottom buttons pause, stop, or eject the CD. When the CD is paused, playing may be resumed by clicking on either the pause button or the play button.
The "stop mode" selector. When workman is done playing a CD, it can stop, play the CD over again (the Repeat setting), or eject it. Click the MENU mouse button to select a stop mode; or click SELECT on the pull-down item to cycle through the available choices.
The "play mode" selector. This determines the playing order of the tracks. Two selections are always available: Normal, which plays the CD from start to end, and Shuffle, which plays the tracks in random order. In addition, if any playlists have been defined, they'll appear here as well.
A gauge indicating how long the CD has been playing and how much longer is left.
Three buttons that bring up the About, CD Info, and Goodies popups.
The artist's name.
The title of the CD as a whole.
A scrolling list of tracks and their titles. This can be used to view the tracks on a CD, or to select tracks for editing using the controls below.
The name of the track that's selected on the scrolling list. As a shortcut, if RETURN is typed after entering a track name, the scrolling list selection will automatically advance to the next track. This allows you to type in all the track titles without using the mouse. The track title can contain several special symbols that alter the main window's display. "//" forces a line break; the text after the "//" will be displayed below the text before it. WorkMan will automatically split lines that are too big for the main window. If a line begins with "+", the main window's disc title display is replaced with the text after the "+" (useful for classical CDs, with several tracks that are part of the same work.) If a line begins with "@", the main window's artist display is replaced with the text after the "@" (useful for compilation CDs with tracks by several artists.) Both "+" and "@" may be used alone on a line, in which case the program uses the title or artist from the previous track. If a line is empty, the corresponding line from the previous track is used. For example, a track title "@Orff//+Carmina Burana////Stetit Puella" will replace the artist's name with "Orff", the CD name with "Carmina Burana", and display two lines of track title, the second "Stetit Puella" and the first copied from the first line of title from the previous track. (If this sounds confusing, don't worry -- play with it for a few minutes and you'll see how it works.)
The "Continuation" selector. If this is selected, the current track is a continuation of the previous one. This is taken into account when the CD is played in shuffle mode; if, for example, three tracks are part of the same piece of music (indicated by setting "Continuation" on the second and third tracks), they will be played together in shuffle mode.
The "Don't play" selector. If this is selected, the program will avoid the track when playing the CD (though you can still play the track by selecting it directly using the main window's track selection buttons.)
The default volume setting. Use this if a particular disc or track should be played especially loudly or quietly. If the slider is all the way to the left, there is no default setting and the current volume will be used.
The default play mode setting. When the CD is inserted, the main window's play mode selector will be set according to this item. "From List" will select the first playlist.
The auto-play setting. If this is selected, the CD will start playing automatically when it's inserted (even if the main window is closed to an icon!)
Apply and Reset buttons. Apply will save the CD information to disk. Reset undoes any changes you've made.
A button to bring up the "Playlists" popup.
A scrolling list, from which you can select a playlist to edit or maim.
The name of a scrolling list to create, or the new name for the current list.
A button which creates a new list, using the name above or a boring system-generated one if no name has been entered.
A button to rename the current list to whatever is in the Name field.
A button to delete the current list.
The tracks in the current playlist. To add tracks, use the popup menu (which appears when you hit the MENU mouse button over the scrolling list.) The popup menu is pinnable, so you can keep it on the screen and select tracks quickly.
A button to delete the currently-selected track from the playlist.
The balance setting.
The time display settings. The running times to the left of the slider and gauge in the main window can display either elapsed time (the default) or remaining time; use these to choose.
The auto-play setting for unknown CDs (CDs which you haven't seen before, or which you saw before but didn't Apply to your database file from the CD Info window.) If this is selected, unknown CDs will be played when they're inserted.
The controls for the A-B repeat function. While the CD is playing, click the Start button to mark the start of a passage to be repeated; then click the End button when the CD reaches the end of the passage. Click on the "Repeat section of CD" item to start repeating the passage (and to stop, once you've started.)
The Split button. This button allows you to split any track in two. Select a track from the main window, and use the track-position slider to choose the split point. Then hit the Split button and the track will be divided. You can do everything with the new section that you can with a regular track, including choosing a name. Tracks may be split while the CD is stopped or paused, or while it's playing. This is useful if you wish to mark a section of a song, for instance; you can listen for the start of the section, and hit Split as soon as you hear it beginning.
The Delete button. Use this to put a split-up track back together. You can't delete the first section of a track.
A button to scan for index marks. If a CD already has sections marked via index marks (usually indicated in the liner notes), hit this button to search for them. Searching for marks can take a while depending on the particular CD. Every time an index mark is encountered, its track will be split as if you'd used the Split button.
Due to another library bug, the program will dump core when the default volume slider is wiggled back and forth under Solaris 2. (The Sun bug ID is 1097908.)
There is no way to choose a playlist other than the first one as the default.
Some of the options and environment variables should be done with X resources or a properties sheet.
The database should have an index of some sort for quickly looking up CDs, since the current linear search can get a little slow on big databases.
Interaction with data CDs, especially ones that are mounted as filesystems, is spotty at best. The program should unmount a CD before ejecting it.
The CD Info popup's interaction with mouseless mode is annoying.
If the volume manager (Solaris 2.2) is running and the "eject" program is used to eject the CD, a message about loading an unnamed CD will appear on the console. There's nothing WorkMan can do to avoid that.
The program's name is a pretty moronic pun.
ULTRIX port by Chris Ross (cross@eng.umd.edu).
HPUX port by John Brezak (brezak@apollo.hp.com). Note: Hewlett Packard supplies this without warranty or support of any kind.
Linux port by Chris Newbold (newbie@inmet.camb.inmet.com).
Please report bugs in the HPUX and ULTRIX versions to koreth@hyperion.com, as well as non-Linux-specific bugs in that version.