Q: What is the porpoise of TSID?
A: TSID (Time Sid Manager) is essentially a way to collect your TSL (Time Spent Listening) statistic about your listened sids, and consequently it may elaborate these statistic to found some great information.

Q: So TSID is a new sid player?
A: No, it is not a player. It's a library that a player may use to collect information.

Q: What kind of information can be extracted from my stored statistics?
A. Well, the program examiner can produce sorted list of your listen tunes. For examples it may produce a sorted list of tunes you have listen for more time, or the authors you listen more often.

Q: Examiner has a pondered option. What is this option?
A: TSID stores two values for each tune you listen: the total second you listen it, and the number of time you listen it. These information are used for producing ordered list. However if I want to try to determine my best sid/composer, I must use each values for ordering the list, using an algorithms that merge the two value and produce a score.

Q: How is calculated the score in pondered option?
A: The idea is this: if you listen to a tune for his length, you optain 100 points (100% of a tune); a 50% of length produce 50 points. This looks good for all tunes, but not for looped tune. If you listen a short repeated tune, you can obtain a big point. So, a interpolation rate is used to limitate this effect. However, it's probably that the paramethers used may changed in the future for reaching a better result.

Q: May I use TSID for collecting information about sids not in HVSC?
A: This is a good question, because TSID was developed with HVSC in mind. Actually TSID put the information in it's directory looking at the passed file names, so a HVSC file may be passed like: Gray_Matt/Driller.sid. But if I pass a file like My_Sid/Author_x/tune1.sid, this directory will be created in the main TSID directory. If "My_Sid" is different between all HVSC directory, you may collect information to the other your collection without having problem with HVSC.
I'm afraid if TSID should support other collections, because HVSC is the most complete available. So, if you want to use other collection, you may put the others your collection in a new directory inside HVSC, this is not philosophically correct, but works.
Note: with TSID2 (next generation of TSID) it is possible to listen to tunes located where you want as it is based onto MD5 fingerprinter. So look for the state of TSID2!

Q: I see that tunes listen for less than 10 seconds are not stored. Is this a bug?
A: No. This is a choice to avoid to include the short sound effects and for allowing a user to choose the tune he wants, instead of the default starting up when open a sid file.

Q: I had used a sidplayer with tsid but I didn't apply the update file to the stored information after each HVSC upgrade. Can I apply all the updates now?
A: Yes, but there are some things to known. The update process moves the stored information as the new upgrade in HVSC require. So if a file was /DEMOS/Pippo.sid and now it is /best/pippo.sid, the update process takes the information stored for /DEMO/pippo.sidt and move these to /best/pippo.sidt. If /best/pippo.sid already exists, the information are merged, so you can apply the update after having listen to some HVSC upgrade.
However there is a case that this can not be done: if some subsongs changes their positions from an upgrade. At this point if you don't apply the tsid update, when you listen that subtunes, the stored information goes onto the wrong positions.
Hohever my experience says these: in one HVSC upgrade only 3 tunes are of these kind, so the probability to listen to them with more than 20.000 sids is little.

Tognon Stefano FAQ about TSID

Q: Why do you call the project TSID?
Because TSID sound good. Just a pronunciation choice.

Q: Why do you have thought to realize this project?
A: In that days, I was looking at top 10/100 sid tunes lists that ca be found in the net. These lists are the result of people voting about their best tunes. Why vote? The best way should be that my sid player give me my list automatically looking at my listen history.

Q: When did you decide to realize the program?
A: In year 2000 I was at military service (as conscientious objector) and this occupation took me all energy. At September I had realize that I loosed 90% of my programming abilities during this service, so I wanted to start with a C++ project that give me the opportunity to restart to program.
If you look at the code, you will see a lot use of pointers: just a way to not forget them.

Q: I don't think that my time statistic will say who is my best sids, so why collect these information?
A: Just for curiosity: how many sids had you listen until now? 5%, 10%,... 100% of HVSC?
But there is a hidden features of TSID that I want to illustrate. When I looked at the HVSC the first time (late 1999), in a month I listen at random many sids, just like to give an idea about the collection. One day I listen to a sid and after a week I realize that this sid was a cover of a french song. So I try to remember where the sid was in the HVSC looking at the sid player history, but unfortunately the tune was fall out of history.
The last hope: STIL. No, the cover is not already in STIL. So I'm still looking at that sid without result.
But if I were using TSID, I can found the sid in a simple way: looking for files stored by TSID that were last modified in the date I listen the tune. If I remember the date correctly (1 or 2 days of errors) this can reduce to search to a 10/20 sids in the best case (or 100/200 in the worst, but this is better that looking at 20000 sids).