MP3 and CSDS
I cued for a square dance the other night and the caller used your CSDS system. I was very impressed. He said you sold the basic program and to contact you for info and price. I already have a laptop with enough memory and I hope for your program. I have over 3000 records but use only about 400 when I travel.

The program is primarily geared towards callers, and the music portion of the program is just one part of the program.

As a round dance cuer, you probably don't really need my program. Callers, on the other hand, appreciate the music portion of the program because it can do automatic looping for patter records.

You could get by just fine by having the following:

1. A "ripper" program such as Audiograbber to record your music, and convert it into MP3;
2. An MP3 player. Many are available for free download from the web.

The CSDS program, on the other hand, has a few features that you may find useful:

1. The list of music files is stored in a database, which can be sorted by title, label, etc. The database can also be used to mark your music as Phase II, Phase III, or whatever.
2. The database also allows a cue sheet to be associated with each music file. When you load the music file into the music player, the cue sheet can automatically be displayed by clicking a button.

You don't need to worry about how much memory your laptop has, but you do need to worry about hard disk space. Although MP3 files are much smaller than WAV files, they still do take up space. One gigabyte of space can hold about 600 45-rpm records.

If you're still interested in CSDS, I could make a version of the program that only included the music section for a reduced price (perhaps US$100 or so).

More information on CSDS can be found at http://www.ceder.net/csds.php

More information about calling (or cueing) using MP3 files can be found at http://www.ceder.net/mp3.php

MP3 format
I am a round dance leader and would like some information on the MP3 file format. I use MD right now and would like to know the size of space that these MP3 files take up as opposed to a record recorded onto the MD or CD. In other words, I can get approx fifty 45RPM records (mono) on a minicd, how many MP3 files would I be able to get on the same media?

I don't know the capacity of a Mini-Disk. I also don't know whether it makes sense to compare sizes on a Mini-Disk, since I'm not sure whether mp3 files can be played from a Mini-Disk player. Sony might also do some sort of compression to fit more on the disk.

A typical audio CD (650MB) should hold at least 375 Square/Round dance mp3 files.

Storing music on a laptop is very convenient in terms of locating specific pieces of music since you can select the music from a sorted list.