Hiya folks,

After spending 10mins trying to discover if i owned a particular CD i had the familiar thought that I really need to get things a bit more organised..

In the ideal world i'd have ripped everything i own, CD and LP and have it losslessly stored on raid arrays.. one day i will do.. for the moment its a pain to be honest.. and the actual time to do secure ripping prohibits it as well.. I did get a BIG rip of everything into mpc a few years ago but over the years hdd failures and wanting free space has had me delete the things i'd never really listen to..

Anyways, foobar, winamp etc etc all have databases for music but it strikes me that it'd be good to have a database for music that didn't rely on having actual music files in the first place.. What i'd like to do is for 95% of my music on CDs just insert the disc.. get the CDDB info and store it in a database.. the fields being extendible would be nice so i could also put misc data in it.. such as what shelf the CD is on etc..

Of course i could just setup a DB to do it but i'm just so busy at the moment.. is there an app out there to do this sort of thing!?

Cheers

Jim

You looking for OrangeCd Catalog , it does just what you want.
http://www.firetongue.com/
nice and clean app on my opinion , I used it and love it.

http://www.fnprg.com/catraxx/catraxx.html

http://www.gdsoftware.dk/

Is there somenthing opensource or at least free ?

See this thread:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....howtopic=18569&
We're working hard on this, but it's still far from finished. Any help (ideas and/or programming for the moment) would be appreciated, but I'm afraid it's not nearly ready for common use.

http://collectorz.com/

I use the CD Collector & the MP3 Collector.

I'd also favoured for OrangeCD.
If it just supported more media formats than just MP3 and WMA it would be very close to perfect, imo.

..:: sundance ::..

http://mac.sourceforge.net/

Open source version of the great Mpeg Audio Collection.
Simple to use and supports a lot of audio format.


Features:

* Support for MPEG Audio, MPEGplus, WAV, TwinVQ, Ogg Vorbis, Windows Media Audio, AAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, FLAC and OptimFROG files
* Option to include all (even non-audio) files in collection
* File info: size, length, bit rate, sample rate, mode, version, layer
* Reads all types of tags (ID3, APE, Vorbis Comment...)
* Collection, volume and folder information
* Quick searching for file name, property, Tag or duplicates
* Searching in collection or on a drive
* Saving search results
* Playing file(s) with its associated application
* Creating playlists for volumes and folders
* Tag editor (writes ID3v1, ID3v2, APEv2 and Vorbis Comment tags)
* Support Xing & FhG VBR
* Auto open last collection option
* Importing from another collection (COL file)
* Support for very big collections (300 CD's and more)
* Updating existing volumes
* Several collection reports (TXT, HTML, DIF)
* Multilingual interface - 33 languages implemented
* Printing CD-covers
* File Rename utility - easy and powerful, using tags

I'm using Winamp 5.x and I'm quite satisfied. I have about 11.500 audio files which are not all sorted by artist and album. On a lan I found the top100 charts from 1974 to 2001. This means 2700 files, which aren't sorted at all. Thanks to Winamps media library I can handle them very fast. I like that the player and the database are integrated into one program.

I think that jrbamford meant AudioCD database. Unfortunatelly MAC doesn't support these, but I hope it will be added someday 'cause it's a very good program.

Yup, audio CD support will be in the next MAC version.

Groovy.

A possible conversion guide for Collectorz.com's CD-Collector would be nice too. I can't be bothered to add my collection one more time.

Half you folks who replied didn't read the original post carefully enough...

He wants to catalogue audio files that are on his PC, and audio tracks that are on CD (only), and audio tracks that are on LP (only).

I emphasize this because I'd find this useful too.

Cheers,
David.

My favourite programm is Music Library (http://www.wensoftware.com/). Works perfect to catalog any music both on and off your computer (AudioCD, LP, MP3).

Wow, do you realize that MAC will be the best cataloguing program ever (ok, ok, so far ) ?
I'm sure you do
So it will be okay to wait few more days (?) before choosing a ultimate solution ?

it´s free and for winamp... with search-engine and everything else possible:
albumlist.sourceforge.net

I swear by WhereIsIt -- this proggy will catalog everything you own on hard disk, CD-ROM, floppy, ZIP disk, whatever. It will recognize and label CD audio from CDDB. It will store thumbnails of JPGs, GIFs, and other image files. It will allow you to catalog and sort items by category, add flags, create temporary and permanent user lists, and a lot more.

And it has an incredibly powerful search engine that will scan through thousands of items in seconds.

It's not free but worth every penny IMO.

http://www.whereisit-soft.com

BobO

Thanks for all the replies.. we must be close to a definitive answer to my original question

Jasper: Your ideas sounds great.. I like the forward thinking of it as something that could plug into various tools in the future.. not being ready now is a bit of an issue but heck, it takes time to do stuff.. definately possibly interested in your project..

indybrett: Thanks for the collectorz recommendation.. I'm trying music collector right now... quite impressed by it.. the inability to add new fields without them adding it is a bit of an issue but you have to keep things under control.. I've added 14 or so albums and mostly it seems to work well... very possibly i may buy this one and use it.. the only issue for me is not getting it out of that program into other programs easily.. XML output would work but it'd take effort... Also tying up the entries to audio files seems quite slow to do and i dont see any way to play/queue an album not just a track... I realise they try to tie it with that player but offering more functionality would work great with foobar.. though my main motivation isn't really to integrate with a player it would be nice as an aside if it did work better in this fashion.. dragging a whole folder of tracks onto a CD to automatically associate each one with the numbered track of that album.. foobar2000s Database is very powerful too but this is as i kept saying for describing files that aren't online as well as ones that are..

2Bdecided: give Music collector a go from collectorz.. it seems very accomplished and is probably about as good as its going to get without the nice flexibility of these more open and forward suggestions... its going to be time consuming.. especially for vinyl that can't be found... but its pretty neat.. get a trial and give it a go.. you can put 100 albums in it before the trial runs out and its about £20 to buy, which aint too bad..

Everything else suggested.. I will get round to looking, but time is very short for me at the moment... I'm definately interested in seeing where things go.. especially with that other one by Jasper..

Cheers

Music Collectorz also supports scanning the bar codes on the jewel case. I haven't tried it myself. That might be a nice feature if it really works.

You can also export your list to CSV, HTML, cplayer.ini, etc...

I've used both Music Collectorz and Catraxx and the former never managed to reach the flexibility, features and sheer power of the latter. At the time being I'm using Catraxx for my original audio cd collection and Where Is It for everything else. Music Collectorz never fulfilled my demands...Catraxx is able to "produce" a musical encyclopaedia if you use every offered field.

My method of storing a database of my CDs is rather archaic but I'll mention it anyway. I use OpenOffice.org's Text Document program (equivalent to Microsoft Word) and I typed up a list of my CDs. I put the list into 2 columns to get the most I can out of each page when I print it. So far it has worked well and served its purpose. The purpose being that when I'm in a store and I want to know whether I have a certain CD or not, I can look at my list and see if I do have the CD or not. Also it serves as a database so I know exactly what CDs I have incase something ever happens (such a fire, etc) where I may need to replace my entire collection.

One thing that is not obvious about Music Collector (I'm evaluating it, too) is that if you run EAC, or another program that keeps a database that can be exported to CDPLAYER.INI, Music Collector will import from the CDPLAYER.INI file.

I'm not sure what cdplayer.ini is -- I kept pushing the export button in EAC and looking for the file -- which I *never* found. But if you believe in magic, and do the export then choose import from the Music Collector menu, it works.

Saved a bunch of time for me for CDs that I had already ripped with EAC.

-- Rick

Have a look in C:\WINDOWS, or whatever alternate name your system uses. It is basically a text file, which may be opened and edited with NotePad or whatever, to directly fix any mistakes that may have crept in from CDDB or FreeDb.

Regards,
Madrigal

bluewer than blue:

Thanks for your comments.. i'll give it a go on your recommendation over the weekend.. I quite like the polish of Music Collectorz.. the fact that its more expensive too gives you that illusion of you getting more for your money..

I'll see what i think when i've tried both..

Does Catraxx go to other sites as well as CDDB like Collectorz does.. that has already proven to give more odds of finding a particular CD/LP ... i have quite non-mainstream tastes and regularly get albums that aren't in CDDB or anywhere really..

I notice the stars rating on some of the screenshots.. are they your stars or does it pull reviews from allmusic... that'd be quite nice.. or at least a link to the album..

On asthetics alone from screen grabs it just doesn't look as pretty, but i'm no graphics whore.. I was starting to itch at the collectorz being controlled so tightly by the coders.. to the point of adding your own fields to the records.. if you can do this in Collectorz (if its more closer to the DB as having access acces to it suggests) then that'll be nice..

If you could detail some more niggles with collectorz and pros with Cataraxx with your experiences, i for one would find it very helpful..

Cheers

Jim

I went over to the development site and didn't find any mention of adding Audio CD support and even more troubling didn't see any indications of an imminent release. Why do you think otherwise?

-- Rick

I'm a big fan of Collectorz.com's music collector program.

Well i've had a quick play with CATraxx.. it does look very big and powerful.. the trouble is its perhaps too big and powerful.. collectorz one had quite a lot of detail that i dont think i'd use but this one has more..

Its all quite useable.. I think you'd get to know how to use it better than i will know in a few minutes use.. I've just added a CD though and it just comes in with no image for the cover at all... that the collectorz one is happy to leech off of websites is one thing but for a convenience thing it really cant be beat..

I'm really not sure yet...

2BDecided.. you had a play with either.. found anything?

*Thread resurrection*

So, what was the outcome from all of the suggestions?

Are any of the suggested apps still worthwhile or are there any newer ones?

OrangeCD: hasn't been updated since March 23, 2004; dead?
CATrxx: going strong it appears, with June 29, 2005 last update.
Collectorz: going strong it appears, with May 13, 2005 last update for audio.
MAC: unfortunately seems dead. Shame the "adding audio CD" support never materialised.

Appreciate any further updates/comments.

Really no news/updates on this topic? I'd greatly appreciate it!

Harald

I know nothing of the projects you mentioned, but as far as the MDDB proposal (a search for it will probably bring up the main thread), it's pretty much dead (not because of technical difficulties btw).