Cataloguing software

Most people "here" use "Music Collector". It's not a bad tool, and made the race against "OrangeCD" for me.

(Currently downloading Music Label)

Best regards, freundliche Grüße

Stefan

Ah, I tried OrangeCD and Music Collector. I quite liked OrangeCD (quite pretty), Music Collector I didn't get on with. CATraxx for me had a lot of flexibility, but was damn ugly!

Music Label is perfect because you can put the database on a remote (in my case Linux) server, which was something I wanted to do.

The problem with most of these software packages is that they only support CD.

I use Excel for my vinyl/CD collection. It doesn't have the fancy track listing etc. of the packages but seems to do everything else that I need.

I've been putting stuff on it for about 18 months, although I have still to enter all my existing vinyl collection. New records only take a few moments to enter, probably no slower than putting a CD into the computer.

Regards

Andy

I have not got round to my vinyl yet, but I imagine it will take longer.

I know I sound like I'm just plugging Music Label here, but it has a vinyl lookup feature, where it gets the details from Amazon (I think) by searching on artist and title -- it doesn't get the track times, just their titles, but still a hell of a lot quicker than typing them in manually.
Another program I tried came with a small database of vinyl albums that you could query (I can't remember which one it was -- might have been CATraxx).

The quick and easy way... go to your local stationer and buy a small indexed book, use a pen and write the titles and artist in - simple. Do you really need track listings? I have a two little books in my listening room (one for CD, and another for vinyl) and whenever I am stuck for something to play, I just pick a letter select the appropriate item... I will concede that I started this when my collection was much smaller, about 10 years ago, and it was a much less onerous task! I also keep a small tally at the back of the books so I know how may records/cd's I have for insurance purposes. Easy!

I've catalogued my vinyl collection (550 albums), using the AppleWorks database that came with my iBook. The trick is to take as few data from one album as you need and enough to make it do what you want.

I've experienced that you have to think first before you do something stupid and to keep it as simple as possible.

My database contains the following data:
- Name of artist
- Name of record
- Name of label (this is important for me as I have collected lots of stuff on independent labels
- Year of release
- Rating (1 = Brilliant, 2 = Acceptable, 3 = Rubbish). Sometimes I clear out the rubbish bin and put them back under Brilliant. It happened to Siouxsie's 'The Scream' only recently.
- Date of last play.

I'm not interested in songtitles and can only recommend not to bother with them, because you have no idea about the amount of work you cause for yourself (roughly 5000 titles in my case).

That's it. I can make interesting selections of the brilliant ones and the rubbishy ones. It sort of forces you to not only play the recent ones, but to also delve deeper into your collection.

Willem

I strongly recommed Music Collector as, with a bit of thought, you can feed it what you want from automatic on-line sources and then have it report back what you want. It only takes as long as it takes to either put the CD in the drive and search the sources or search for vinyl manually by typing the artist and title (albeit a bit of editing of label and cat no. usually required for the vinyl version). Song titles are important to me, and in fact with Music Collector its just as easy to have them as not.
I did use to record them in a book by hand but this is way more efficient,tidy, and powerful e.g. I wanted a list of just my 12" singles a while ago and with 3 or 4 mouse clicks I had it in alpha order to enable me to dig them out of my racks. Love it!

Cheers

Rich

I use CD Trustee which I think is very good, but have not used Music Collector, so don't know how it compares. Worth checking out though.

Music Collector looks useful but the thought of re-entering my collection into another system fills me with dread.

Excel may not be perfect but it's as good as I need.

However, if I was starting from scratch I would definitely use one of these packages

Andy

Do any of the CD catalog products accept a file containing a list of the CD manufacturers catalog number and then go out to the various sources to obtain the Title, performer, track information.

I have the collection cataloged in a dBase style database using PCFileDB access code so creating the list of CD numbers is easy.

Derek

<< >>

Excel for me too!

Fairly straightforward for data entry
Surname(or Band)
Firstname
Title
Release order

Work fields to get the first letter of the surname field to facilitate subtotals by letter.
The 'printed' detail column concatenates Firstname, Surname and Album Title, so that when printed you would see "Albert King" preceding Carol King" in the letter "K"

Rather nifty macro (even if I say so myself!) to sort and print. It opens Microsoft Word, and then transfers the list to a document consisting of 3 filofax pages per sheet of A4. (Paginated to the correct length for the FF page and correctly formatted for manual duplex printing).

Sad but true.

Steve.

I can understand why we feel the need to catalogue our collection but can't help feeling we are making a rod for our own backs. Suggest we take Mrs.Lomo's approach. If she has't worn an item for a period of time she passes it on. If we put to one side the records/ cds we never play anymore we would hardly need a catalogue.