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: Why isn't this option implemented?
A: essentially because the better way that the algorithm may produce the score is not yet founded.
Think at this examples: if a tune A has a length of 1 minute and  I want to listen it for 3 minutes, I must listen it 3 times; but If another tune B  with the same length is a looped tune, I may listen it one time for 3 minutes. So I may have:
A: 3 times  3 minutes
B:  1 times 3 minutes
Witch score may A and B have? Probably the same, because I wonted to listen 1 times each for 3 minutes.
So only when a good algorithm will be found, the pondered will be implemented.

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. However actually you cannot doing this because the available patches for the player use the HVSC path set in the player, so the tune in My_Sid will be not recognize as a valid HVSC files from the player, so TSID fails to collect this information (e.g. these tunes will be collected in a unique file with the name .tsid_hvsct, but this is a bug).
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.

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.

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 15000 sids).