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This section describes each of the fields in the three Musi-cal submission forms: the traditional form, the performer-oriented form, and the venue-oriented form. If you've never submitted content to Musi-Cal before, please read through this section at least once. Any time you have a question about an item you can select its name in the form to jump to its description in this document. If this document doesn't answer all your questions, please contact us.
If you have many events to enter or submit a lot of dates that change fairly frequently, consider using the Gig Gopher. The venue- and performer-oriented forms are designed to simplify schedule submission for an individual venue or musician, but you can also select the appropriate radio button near the top of the traditional submission form to indicate that you are submitting multiple items for the same artist, venue, event or city. Each time you submit an item, the relevant information from the that submission will be retained and another partially completed submission form presented.
Enter the performer name(s) in the appropriate field. Where possible, please enter it so it sorts properly. For instance, enter "Watson, Doc", not "Doc Watson". Enter "Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, The", not "The Cleveland Symphony Orchestra". Separate multiple performers on the same bill by '/'. Tony Cuffe and Trevor Hunter appearing on the same bill would be entered as "Cuffe, Tony/Hunter, Trevor". Also use this field to identify soloists and conductors. If Andre Previn is conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and James Galway is the soloist, enter "Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Previn, Andre/Galway, James". Either the performer or event name (or both) must be filled in.
Make sure you enter all the performers you know about in this field! Do not (for instance) enter "Sting" in the performer field and then enter "Opening act: Cowboy Junkies" in the information field. Similarly, if you are submitting an item for the opening act, don't enter "Cowboy Junkies" in the performer field and "Opening for Sting" in the information field. People searching the database for performers will only find them if they are listed in the performer field.
[Only in the traditional submission form] If the concert is part of an event, enter that name here. Either the performer or event name (or both) must be filled in. Note that if you are entering performer names you aren't required to enter anything in the event name field (and vice versa).
Please fill in a specific event name. The following are all fine event names:
Musi-Cal understands several date formats. Here are some examples:
Month names must be given in one of the following languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Portugese, Norwegian or Finnish. Common three-letter abbreviations such as "Jan" or "Aug" are also understood. If you send us a list of the names of the months of the year in other languages, we will update the appropriate tables.
Terms such as "any", "other", "all", "??", "July and August" or "*", or partial dates such as "September" or "September '96" aren't understood by the date parsing code in Musi-Cal and will generate an error. If you want to specify a range of dates, use one of the formats listed above. When searching (not submitting!), if you don't care about a specific date or range of dates, leave the date field blank.
Enter the concert venue and the venue's street address (where known), in the appropriate fields. The city and either the state (US), province (Canada) or country (non-US/Canada) are required. The venue is the facility holding the event (such as Sports Arena, Soldier Field or McCabe's Guitar Shop. Except when using the venue-oriented submission form or submitting multiple items for the same venue in the traditional submission form, the venue is optional. Do not enter other information about the venue in the venue name field, just the venue name. All three forms have a field in which to enter the venue's address. Please don't include it in the same field as the venue name.
Enter the price where known. Note: The format of this field is
severely constrained. Prices can be one of the following: the word
free, a simple price with a dollar sign (e.g. $10
or $27.50) or a series of simple prices separated by a forward
slash (e.g. $27.50/$15/$10). Anything that doesn't match one
of those formats will be silently deleted. Although we try not to be
America-centric, we don't know all the currency symbols around the world.
If you need to enter prices using other currencies, please let us know and
we will try to expand the list of supported currency symbols.
Your name and email address are required. We validate potential editors based on the submitter's or other assigned editor's email address. Please double-check your email address. If we notice a problem with an entry it is the only way we will have of contacting you for corrections. The system performs some validation checks on email addresses but it's not foolproof.
Note: There is a 256-character* limit on the length of the info field. You can link to Web sites containing more detailed performer, venue, event and city information using Musi-Cal's Notes Index. Note: Booking people and other back office people aren't the right people to be fielding ticket and seating requests and they take a very dim view of being called at home at 2am by someone looking for ticket prices.
Enter corollary information that doesn't fit elsewhere in this field. This includes items such as age restrictions on the concert. Do not enter URLs that point to Web pages for the performer, venue, event or city here. Use the Notes Index (for performers and cities) or the Venue Database (for venues) instead .
Note: There is a limit of five keywords per event. Although keywords are not required, we urge you to identify your entry carefully to give people searching the best possible chance of finding what they are interested in. We are open to suggestions about other keywords. You can also enter keywords for artists in the Notes Index. Those keywords will be added to any entry for the same artist.
Selecting multiple items from a scrolled list is platform- and browser-dependent. For those people having trouble figuring it out (believe us, it's not at all obvious in many cases), we created a Web page to help.
If you know the time the event starts (and ends) you can enter it here. We have begun to make use of the time field in other applications, so the more consistently it is specified, the better use we can make of it. Consequently, the format of this field is severely constrained. Simple times such as "8pm", "7:30pm" or "noon" are fine, as are start and end times separated by a hyphen, such as "9pm-1am" or "noon-3pm".
One extra bit of advice: Try and enter items consistently, especially venue, city, state, country, performer and event names. They are used as keys to build specialized lists. We attempt to present commonly abbreviated names in a canonical form. Cities, states and countries are capitalized. When they appear in geographic names, Saint, Sainte and Fort are displayed as abbreviations. Compass points are never abbreviated. The system is currently case-sensitive. Nothing is done to change the spelling or capitalization of artist names or venues. If you enter "rem" instead of "R.E.M." two different entries will appear in the database. Similarly, if you enter "Willie Nelson" instead of "Nelson, Willie", he will be listed under the "W"s instead of the "N"s, although we are getting smarter about properly reordering performer names.
*Non-programmers
probably scratch their heads at the odd numbers programmers pick for limits.
Computers like to chunk things into powers-of-2. In particular, 28 is 256, 216 is
65,536, and 232 is 4,294,967,296. Don't
exactly roll off your tongue, do they? ;-)
Contact Us!
Copyright © 2007 Wolfgang's Vault