MusicMaster Blog

By Drew Bennett

One of the many features we all love about MusicMaster is the ability to customize the look and feel of it. You can change layouts, move windows around, choose to show or hide elements. You can even plug your own logo into the software and print reports or just spruce things up a bit. Now, MusicMaster 5.0 takes customization a step further with Custom User Buttons for your main Toolbar.

The main Toolbar includes all the major sections of the software. You will find icons for Library Maintenance, Clocks, the Rule Tree, Scheduler, Analysis and the History Browser.

With MusicMaster 5.0, you have the ability to add up to three more icons to this menu and it’s easy to do with INI files. “INI” stands for ‘initialization.’ They are files utilized when the software launches. INI files are really just simple text files that are made up of Sections and Properties. Each section is surrounded in brackets “[].” Each property has a name and a value delimited by an “=” sign.

To build a new Custom User Button in MusicMaster, open Notepad in Windows. With a blank Notepad document open, create the user button section by typing the section name between brackets:

[UserButton1]

Now it’s time to define some properties of the user button. First, let’s decide that this button will launch a web browser and take us to the MusicMaster website. We need to define the URL that our browser will point to. That property looks like this:

URL=http://www.musicmaster.com
You can even provide a tool tip that displays text when you hover over the user button:
Tooltip=Take me to MusicMaster.com!
So, a simple Custom User Button might look like this:
[UserButton1]
URL=http://www.musicmaster.com
Tooltip=Take me to MusicMaster.com!

You may already have a file in your MusicMaster installation folder called musicmaster.ini. If you do, you can place these sections and properties in your existing file. If you do not have a musicmaster.ini file, save your Notepad document with the name musicmaster.ini and place it in MusicMaster’s root installation folder on your machine. Open MusicMaster and you should see your new button, a wrench with a blue background, next to the History Browser icon. Try it out and see how it works!

You can further customize your buttons with your own images and other properties. For instance, you can assign an image to your custom buttons like this:

Image=C:\images\my_icon.ico

Note: Icon images should be 32×32 pixels in size. If you don’t have your own icon images to use, search for free icons on the internet and save them to a folder.

Adding an image and its path to the simple example above now displays the new icon in the main Toolbar:

[UserButton1]
Image=C:\images\my_icon.ico
URL=http://www.musicmaster.com
Tooltip=Take me to MusicMaster.com!

With Custom User Buttons, you can launch applications and specify command line arguments for those applications. For instance, let’s open Spotify on our local machine:

App= C:\Users\Owner\AppData\Roaming\Spotify\spotify.exe

Now, let’s use a CommandLine to send a search query to the application:

CommandLine=spotify:search:artist:%FLD:102%

Field 102 in my MusicMaster database happens to be the Artist field. This button would open Spotify and search for the Artist Name of the song card I have highlighted in MusicMaster. Here is a full example of a button that opens Spotify and searches for an artist name.

[UserButton2]
Image=C:\images\my_icon_2.ico
App= C:\Users\Owner\AppData\Roaming\Spotify\spotify.exe
CommandLine=spotify:search:artist:%FLD:102%

Your MusicMaster Help section has more details on the things you can do with Custom User Buttons. Choose Help, Contents, MusicMaster for Windows, Technical Reference, INI Files, MusicMaster.ini. You will find a few more properties you may set including the ability to launch applications in the background, see web pages in MusicMaster’s internal browser and adding captions to your icons.

If you need assistance setting this up or you have questions about MusicMaster, please don’t hesitate to contact your assigned MusicMaster Music Scheduling Consultant. Happy Scheduling!