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Contact Us!Copyright © 2007 Wolfgang's Vault
We are extremely gratified by the overwhelmingly positive response the Internet community has shown to Musi-Cal and its sister site, Mojam.com. We get lots of mail related to the sites. In an attempt to try and answer some of the most common questions and reduce the size of our mailboxes, we've put together this list of frequently asked questions. Before sending mail to concertmaster@musi-cal.com please check this list to see if your question has already been answered.
Send or post concert information as early as possible, but don't list tentative or unconfirmed dates. Also, don't wait until the last minute to put your dates into our database. We seem to get many announcements on Wednesday or Thursday for concerts taking place on Friday or Saturday. It's highly unlikely that your fans will see such listings in time to make plans.
You are welcome to send concert information in any format that is convenient for you. We will try to process them. The more work it takes for us to dig your concert dates out of your mail, the less likely it is they will get posted. There is no guarantee that we will be able to process what you send us. We don't do Windows, so Word and Excel files are likely to cause problems. If you can't avoid sending Word files, at least save them in RTF format first. If you can't avoid sending files generated by Excel, please try saving them as CSV format.
Send press releases containing concert dates to concertmaster@mojam.com. If they are in plain text we will do our best to process them, though you can also submit dates directly, which cuts out the middle man.
You can help us out by entering the data yourself. There are several ways to do it and some software to help. The easiest way to enter a few dates is to use the submission form on the Web version of Musi-Cal. This works well if you only have a few items to enter.
If you want to submit a schedule for an individual venue or performer, we provide forms to simplify both tasks.
You can use the email interface to submit dates, though we don't recommend it for novice users. To get more information about the email interface to Musi-Cal, check out the users guide.
If you send basic information such as performer name and a URL referencing a web page containing a concert schedule we will try to set up the Gig Gopher to process that page automatically on a regular basis. There are formatting restrictions.
There are a couple potential sources of problems (assuming you spelled the artist, venue, city, ... correctly). If you submitted your item by email, note that email messages are only processed about every twenty minutes during the peak usage hours, so your entry might not be in the database yet. Also, note that many search results are cached for performance reasons, so it may take a few minutes for your new dates to show in searches.
If you are the person who submitted an entry to the database or are an assigned editor for a particular artist or venue, you can edit or delete appropriate entries without help (or interference) from us. The online editing form is the easiest way to edit entries, though you can also edit by email. To learn more about editing entries by email, read the sections in the users guide about the edit and change commands.
Musi-Cal supports the notion of editors for particular artists, venues or cities. If you are interested in being an editor (or need to because your job or avocation is to do Net-based publicity), contact us for details.
While most of the data people submit to Musi-Cal is accurate, there are a number of problems that seem to pop up more frequently than others. Here is a list of things to watch out for.
SOME PEOPLE
SEEM TO HAVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY ON WHILE TYPING. other
people don't seem to like anything capitalized. Please try
and capitalize names properly. If a performer name or other name is
properly all caps or all lower case (like REM or
disappear fear), by all means, submit them that way. If
not, please use normal capitalization of your entries.
Individual performer names should be given so that they sort properly. For individual artists, this means last name first ("DiFranco,Ani" instead of "Ani DiFranco"). For bands whose names begin with "The", place it last, separated from the rest of the name by a comma ("Nields,The", not "The Nields"). Name ordering is getting to be less of a problem. We now have checks in the calendar's backend software that helps us identify many incorrectly ordered names.
Sometimes people submit entries with a single artist in the performer field, then place something like "opening for Joe Dokes" in the info field. If Joe Dokes will be performing, make sure he's listed in the performer field. That's the only way people will be able to search for him.
Multiple performer names must be separated by a slash ('/'). If Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails are performing on the same bill the performer field would be listed as "Nirvana/Nine Inch Nails" (or the other way around...) Also, if an opening act is known, include it. Many people submit data for the headliner but either neglect to mention the opening act(s) or place them in the info or program fields.
People (at least most Americans :-) tend not to be great at geography. This is unfortunate, because in addition to not doing very well at Jeopardy!, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? and the hopelessly elementary geography questions in Family Double Dare it means that entries with misspelled cities, states or countries show up in unusual places in Musi-Cal or don't get displayed at all. (For example, the town of Detroit Lakes is in Minnesota, not Michigan.) Please double-check the spelling of place names. If you submit schedules using the Gig Gopher it will attempt to look up the latitude and longitude of cities and warn you if it can't find the city. Also, don't forget there are lots of cities with the same name, particularly in many US states (good-sized cities named Bloomington are in Minnesota, Indiana and Illinois, for instance).
When submitting entries for the US and Canada, give just the city and state or province. Don't add 'USA' or 'Canada' or zip/postal codes. When submitting entries for other countries, give just the city and country. There is currently no means to handle provinces, states, counties or republics in other countries.
Especially in the folk music genre, where there is a lot of participation, we often see more than one person submit entries for the same artist. If you want to submit something to the calendar, please do a quick query first to see if the items you have are already in our database.
If you are updating an artist's data in the database, don't just add the new stuff. Delete the old stuff first and add the entire schedule. Cancellations aren't necessarily reflected in tour updates. Note that the Gig Gopher automatically takes care of keeping your entries in the Musi-Cal database in sync with your published schedule. (There's another reason to use the Gig Gopher!)
The Musi-Cal web server was broken into in early December (2001). In our haste to get some semblance of a server back up and running, some URLs that used to work may not work and may no longer work. Here are some examples of links that should work:
http://www.musi-cal.com/search?performers=%5eEddie+from+Ohio%24
Note the "%5e" before the band's name and the
"%24" after it. They anchor the search at the
start and end of the name to exclude other names from matching
and makes the search execute much more quickly. For example,
searching for "Cher" will match both "Cher" and "Cheryl
Wheeler", while searching for "%5eCher%24" will only match
"Cher".
http://www.musi-cal.com/search?venue=Caffe+Lena&city=Saratoga+Springs,NY
http://www.musi-cal.com/search?city=Chicago,IL
Yes, and we encourage that. In general, you should be able to bookmark URLs. We try hard to make them work over the long haul. You can also create URLs that perform just as complicated queries as you can generate with the email interface or the Web form. Here are a couple examples.
http://www.musi-cal.com/search?performer=Greg+Brown
http://www.musi-cal.com/search?city=Chicago&state=IL&radius=75+miles&keywords=blues
If your Web site isn't related to a performer, venue or city, it's not possible for us to link to it. We're not trying to be snobs. We appreciate all the links to Musi-Cal and where it is appropriate you can set up a link back to your site using the Notes Index, however we just don't have the resources to manually maintain a list of links to other sites. We aren't a general-purpose search engine. Display of links to other sites is based upon information found in the search results, namely the performer names, the venue name and the city/state or city/country combination.
You can easily add items to the Notes Index, a database of permanent links to performer-, venue- and city-related Web pages used to embellish Musi-Cal's event display. To enter a Notes Index item using the Web interface, visit the Notes Index submission page and fill in the appropriate form. To enter a Notes Index item using email, send email to concerts@musi-cal.com with a message body similar to
add
static
performer Taylor,James
url <a href="http://www.shore.net/~jrisberg/JT.html">James Taylor Online</a>
end
Check out the Gig Gopher. If you can wangle it into an acceptable form and submit it by email, the best place to look is the new Gig Gopher submission form.
There is no direct support for recurring dates yet in Musi-Cal. What you can do is send a message to concerts@musi-cal.com on approximately a monthly basis for each recurring date that looks something like (for a venue):
default
event Open Mic
venue Moon Shadow Cafe
city Sudbury
state MA
pattern %{smonth}/%{days}/%{syr}
info Hosted by Ellen Schmidt and Jake Kensinger
end
convert
1/4,11,18,25/99
2/1,8,15,22/99
end
or (for a specific performer):
default
performers Montanaro,Joe
venue Bayou Cafe
city Glenville
state NY
pattern %{smonth}/%{days}/%{syr}
end
convert
1/4,11,18,25/99
2/1,8,15,22/99
end
Save that information, then late in the time period covered by the last submission, replace the lines in the convert section with the next set of dates for the event. If you're confident the schedule is going to be stable for more than a month's worth of weekly gigs, you can of course submit more dates and do it less frequently.
We try and add data to the calendar whenever we can. The effort it takes us to secure and enter a single band's tour information makes it infeasible for us to attempt to operate that way on a grand scale. Musi-Cal's success stems from the contributions of many people on the net. It was designed from the start to allow people to submit concert dates. That's not because we are lazy slackers. It's because there's so much stuff out there it would be impossible to try and cover everything personally. We've spent a lot of effort creating and refining powerful submission tools, from the general submission form to the Musi-Cal Gig Gopher submission pages for email-based schedule submission.
So check it out with an eye to making a small contribution. Each contribution, no matter how small, improves the site for everyone.
That said, if you tell us who you want to see in the calendar, we will look around for them when we have the time. If you want to be informed as soon as possible if any dates for that artist have been added to the calendar, set up a repetitive query. For instance, suppose you wanted to know when new James Taylor dates became available. Simply send email to concerts@musi-cal.com with a message body of
get
performers James Taylor
repeat weekly
end
If we don't have what you're looking for, Google is the best general-purpose search engine around. You will often be able to find highly relevant links to your favorite musicians by searching Google for them.
If we have a ticket link on a listing you should be able to click it to purchase tickets. Otherwise, If the listing has a venue name, try calling the venue. If not, check with ticket agencies in the vicinity of the concert city.
The repetitive query feature is in a state of flux at the moment (as of October 2003). Deleting queries may not be working properly. If you would like to delete a repetitive query, you can drop a note to concertmaster@mojam.com with details of the query and we'll delete it for you.
This is a common problem. Every browser/platform combination seems to do things differently. For some help with this, take a look at
http://www.musi-cal.com/~skip/buttons.html
No. If you have access to electronic mail or the World-Wide Web you can query the database or add new events to the database for free. We intend to keep use of Musi-Cal free, though we charge a nominal fee for priority support. We do ask organizations to consider advertising on Musi-Cal, where our user base overlaps with their potential customers.
Sure. There are several things you can do.
Contact Us!
Copyright © 2007 Wolfgang's Vault