In my job I do a great deal of repetitive keyboard work, so I have always used macro-enabled keyboards to good advantage, to the point where my demands outstrip the capabilities of the keyboards.

My Gateway AnyKey keyboard was retired because (a) it wore out and started sending bogus keycodes and thus causing some pretty interesting problems, and (b) it was limited to a maximum of 1024 stored keystrokes before running of of memory.

My MCK 142 Pro was sort of OK, but was limited to just 24 dedicated macro keys, each of which could only accept 128 keystrokes. I ran out of both keys and in some cases keystrokes (had to split the macro across two keys). Also, the speed of execution was unacceptably slow. Some of my macros were taking more than 15 seconds to run.

I started looking at software solutions. In general, they were unacceptable due to complexity of programming and slow speed of operation, particularly the ones that recorded mouse activity as well as keystrokes.

Finally, I found a program called Keyboard Express. This program is good. It is written the way I would have done it if I had designed it myself.

The UI is uncluttered and intuitive, and amazingly powerful. I can write macros that pause in the middle waiting for a window with a specific title to open. I can speed up and slow down the execution speed of the macro as the situation requires, insert pauses and delays, etc. Best of all, I can choose from more than 700 different hot-key combinations, ranging from a simple keystroke (like "Q" or even "q") to things like "ctrl-alt-shift-F11" which, believe it or not, I have actually defined to print order confirmations following a weekend. Each macro can store about 5,000 keystrokes, giving me a capacity of 3.5 million stored keystrokes, more than 3,000 times as many as my old AnyKey could hold. Execution speed ranges from faster than my software can accept to as long between keystrokes as I want to program.

Macro syntax is logical and understandable, and for the most part is drag and drop, that is if I want to program in an alt-tab sequence I click on an "alt" icon and then click on a "tab" icon and the program inserts them. Below is my ctrl-alt-shift-F11 macro (actually one of the simpler ones!) to show what the syntax looks like.

For $24.95, this is a great program!

Weekend Order Confirmation macro:

<DOHOOK><WAITWIN2:0:15:Order Module >
<TAB>1<ENTER><ENTER><ALT>ub<WAITWIN2:0:10:Reports >
<TAB><TAB><DOWN ARROW><DELAY:01.00><ENTER><SPKEY:0025>
<ALT><DOWN ARROW><LEFT ARROW><LEFT ARROW><ENTER><TAB>
<ALT><DOWN ARROW><SPKEY:0000><REPEAT:0008><LEFT ARROW>
<ENDREP><SPKEY:0100><ENTER><ENTER><F5>
<WAITWIN2:0:30:Order Confirmation ><DELAY:10.00><ALT>p<ENTER>
<DELAY:01.00><ALT><TAB><WAITWIN2:0:10:Reports ><ALT><F4>
<WAITWIN2:0:15:Order Module ><ALT><F4>



(I put some extra carriage returns in the above to avoid having to scroll left/right on the bbs, so as shown this macro is "broken", and the non-ascii characters that should print to terminate the window title in the Waitwin sequences show here as spaces. The SPKEY commands are how many milliseconds to insert between keystrokes)

tanstaafl.

Hi,

Thanks for the tip on Keyboard Express, I like it already.

Someone recommended another program on here for tag management. The program is called Tag & Rename.

This is a very user friendly, powerful program for fixing all of your MP-3 tags. It is common for mistakes and wide format variation of tags on download sites. Those mistakes show up on the Rio display. This program allows you to take the tag information, fix those problems (easier than other programs), arrange tag information in a free-from style, and create a file name from the data. You can also make global changes over multiple files, like correcting or customizing the artist name or album title. You can also create tag entries from a file name too.

If there are no tags, I use it to free-form split up the file name into the tags, modify as desired, and re-write the tags and file name to my preferrences. Only drawbacks I have found is that I wish there was a better way to assign track numbers in an automated fashion if you wanted to. Only $40.00 US if you buy it, 30 day free trial, I liked enough to purchase it.

It works real slick and I have used it to make my whole collection (>10,000 files) a common custom format that displays well on the Rio. It also helps with searches too. Here's the address, I don't know if a it will work as a link.

http://www.softpointer.com


I use Exact Audio Copy as well and it is the best I have ever used.


I highly recommend both programs. I am not affiliated with either company, by the way.

Just my experience with the programs, your mileage may vary.

Ross

I'll add a recommendation for the macro software called Macro Angel. This program has very comprehensive keyboard macro programming, including functions such as specifying time between keystrokes, recording (to skip programming by hand), etc.

Macro Angel also has a TON of higher level functionality (which I've never tried and can barely comprehend). This includes Windows GUI level functionality such as switching between programs based on their unique ID and executing other high level Windows functions. Lots of samples are included for your inspiration and adaptation.

This program is no longer being developed, and I don't think you can even buy it any more. The demo version has the only functional limitation of how many "steps" you can have in a macro. Note, you can record a mass of keyboard commands into a single "step", but if you want to use looping or logic to determing which "step" to execute, that's where you may hit the limit.

A brilliant piece of software which has saved me hundreds of error-prone man-hours at my work.