Cataloguing my CDs is a project long in the offing, supposedly going to happen on long winter nights, which I actually spend singing, dancing and playing squash. The lockdown is the obvious time to realise it.
I’m well under way with doing my books, but that’s relatively easy to do on a spreadsheet; each book only needs one entry for each field of author, publisher and year published, so a spreadsheet will do. But the information I might want to record for CDs is more complex, with each CD requiring multiple entries for tracks, musicians, possibly even lyrics for some of the folk stuff.
Some of you must have attempted this / achieved this. Any advice you can give, other than ‘don’t bother, it’ll drive you mad’? In particular, is there any modest database software that would be suited to the task?
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According to the chaps on the We Buy Records podcast, ‘In my collection’ on Discogs.com is the way to go.
Yep Discogs all the way. No spreadsheets, no typing out all the details, Just search for the release and tick when you find the one you’ve got. 99.9% of the time it will be in the database. There’s also a barcode scanner for more recent stuff although that can be a bit hit and miss.
The fun bit is as you go along it tots up the estimated value of your collection (based on actual sales data) which is handy for insurance purposes or placating significant others… and you might be surprised how much even some CDs are still sought after.
It gets a bit trickier if you’re trying to match which specific edition you own and it’s a collectible artist with multiple variants on the same release. It took me a good hour to Identify the exact issue of Sgt Pepper Ive got, There’s also a brilliant phone app which I must confess I have used several times to check I don’t already own a record before buying.
You’re not the only one. For reasons unrelated to the AW, I have been revisiting my collection of 12″ singles by The Bible.
I have five – yes, five – copies of BIBX1, and three plain-sleeve promo copies of the same release.
I can only recall buying one, a couple of years ago from a pound bin, and logic suggests I probably did buy one from Andy’s, Cambridge, in the early 90s.
I suspect the OP will ignore us and build his own database regardless – -*looks down* – yep.
oooh, I never said which set of advice I was going to follow. Don’t know myself yet.
Reading my post back makes me think I should get a smartphone, if only to avoid buying a sixth copy of BIBX1.
Trouble is, people would then be able to get hold of me when I’m out.
Pssst…you don’t have to have it switched on @fentonsteve
I do have a mobile, an old Samsung with a screen the size of a postage stamp. It’s brilliant as, when I carefully explain to people “Don’t email or message me, text or preferably call”, they never do! And I only have to charge it about once a fortnight.
If you had a smart phone you wouldn’t need that MP3 player you’re always banging on about. 😄
Oh yes I would, because I know what goes on inside a smart phone. My colleague left working with me to do the audio hardware for the first iPhone. To say quality was compromised would be an understatement. The pay was better, though.
Very convenient though, to stick on the ear buds and walk round town/Waitrose. Quality listening once I get home to a real stereo.
The weather’s better in Cupertino, too. I got an email asking me if I wanted to join him, but kids at school, upheaval, etc, plus they expect you to work hard. Oddly enough, I bumped into him in Cambridge the week before Christmas. He looked knackered, despite being a good 10 years younger than me.
This was one of my lockdown projects, prompted by having to renew the house insurance. I went for Discogs. It took about a week on and off to get my collection logged, using the phone app – I’d say the barcode scanner coped with about 80% of my collection, and I had to look the rest up manually. As far as your database desires go, Discogs listings usually include tracklisting and personnel, but you’d be very lucky to get lyrics. Your collection is searchable as well – I’ve just checked and I have eight different versions of The World Turned Upside Down, for example.
As the Doctor alludes to, you can fall down a rabbit hole of checking matrix numbers and so on, but I quite like that anyway. You might get a few pleasant surprises as well, like me discovering that my copy of the first QOTSA album is the first pressing that sells for silly money.
There’s a Discogs app that scans CD barcodes and adds the album to your Discogs collection? Holy Shit, finally, a real reason to own an Android phone, right there!
You can start on Excel to get the basic data then there’s a wizard to convert it to SQL server. Try an experiment. That’ll give you loads of flexibility but it’s possibly a steep learning curve (would be for me anyway).
Should have clarified, convert to Access!
I’ve tried a couple of approaches over the years.
I initially used some software called Music Collector (available for most platforms). It was very good but I found myself getting more and more delinquent in updating. The main problem with it though was they moved to a subscription model rather than a one off purchase and the old version I have is not compatible with the recent versions of MacOS – I refuse to pay a subscription model for software so can’t update.
Since then, I’ve used Excel – basically all my CDs are in iTunes and I arranged that in the columns I wanted and simply copy / pasted to Excel. This got me a list of all tracks I had in excel – copying this to a new tab and a bit (well actually a lot) of editing reducing this to an album list view. Once the initial slog was done, it’s actually fairly easy to maintain – just copy and past an new import into iTunes into the excel sheet.
In terms of proper database, I actually use Roon as my music software which has a pretty impressive, extensive and hyperlinked database as part of its functionality.
I think it’s better to export a csv file from iTunes for opening in Excel. That’s what I’ve done and it’s handy to do searches on…. and I keep a copy at work and on my phone.
The advantage of using a spreadsheet is that you can have all the data there and if you ever want to put it into a more bespoke format, you can. If you jump into something that doesn’t have adequate export options, you’re stuck with it.
You can also skin Excel and use pivot tables etc though I don’t know how. Well, a bit of pivot tables I guess.
I’m enjoying Roon on a practical level, but it’s over-fussy genre classifications are driving me nuts. In my iTunes classifications I restrict myself to rock, jazz and classical, because that tells me all I need to know (with one exception: French, just because).
Roon ignores all that and piles in with Religious, which somehow manages to combine Mel Torme (Comin’ Home Baby??), George Jones and the Choir of King’s College Cambridge; Holiday (bleughhh) gives us Vince Guaraldi and the King’s College Choir again; International is Mal Waldron, Edith Piaf and Stan Getz; Miles Davis and John Coltrane appear in Bop, Hard Bop and Post-Bop, and Davis makes it into Cool as well, Coltrane into Modal and Avant-Garde. Ray Charles turns up in Blues, R&B and Jazz Blues. And so on, ad infinitum and nauseam.
Any Roonites know how to deal with this?
Not something that I have tried to deal with – I tend to completely ignore all music classifications (even in iTunes I don’t change whatever the default it gives on import).
Having said that, I do believe that all fields Roon are editable – I.e. you can except the default database entry as a whole and then edit specific details as you desire. I will have a play in the next few days to see,
I did all mine yonks ago. I realised it was a job in its own right and I actually had no use for it. The classification drove me mad too. Johnny Winter. Blues? Rock? Blues rock? Well, he did albums in all those genres, and some featuring all three. I realised I just don’t care, I just want to play Johnny Winter albums.
Rock, country, folk, electronica/dance, classical, blues, jazz, world, r’n’b (as in soul), reggae is more than enough. I have reluctantly added new age for electronica/dance chill out music played orchestrally.
R ‘n B is as purveyed by Dr. Feelgood. Harrumph.
I know, I know, I have argued that long into many a long night, but didn’t need the sub set of guitar music being split up. I classify punk and indie as rock too nowadays. I also call ska reggae and bluegrass country, so beyond redemption. Cajun and zydeco is confusingly world in my classification. Having a lot of fusion and crossover can mean a lot of furrowed brow, I can tell you. Especially if artists change their style, something I frown upon for cataloging purposes.
Well the only point of the classifications is to help you find stuff. In smart playlists mode your definitions wouldn’t work for me – I want a generated bluegrass playlist to be bluegrass not country.
I would have edited that post to say if the classifications work for you then they’re right (…but wouldn’t for me etc). But the phone screen was too small!
Actually, encouraged by @chrisf, I decided to have a poke about in the settings, and lo, there it was – you can ignore Roon’s wacky categories and use your iTunes categories instead. So all good!
Perhaps use Tags in Roon to set your own genres. Apparently you can opt to not use Roon’s metadata and use your own by going into Import Settings. This article may help:
https://kb.roonlabs.com/Genres
I use MediaMonkey in place of a database, because I’m not really that bothered and most of the work gets done for you automatically. The basic data is exportable in HTML, XML, CSV and Excel formats.
MediaMonkey is described by it’s publishers Ventis Media as “a digital media player and media library application”. Basically it’s a collection manager masquerading as a player.
Once you digitise your stuff you can input and then search for all manner of data about it.
Under Properties(right-click on a track and that’s the final item on the menu), the “Basic” page gives you the usual File Path, Filename, Track Title, Artist, Genre, Rating, Album Title, Disc Number, Track Number, Album Artist and Date fields, also has fields for Grouping, Original Date, Composer, Conductor and Comments. The “Details” page offers you fields for Lyricist, BPM, Involved People, Original Artist, Original Album Title, Original Lyricist, ISRC, Publisher, Encoder, Copyright and, automatically generated; Length, File Size, Bitrate, VBR yes/no, Sample Frequency, Channels mono/stereo, Play Counter, Volume Leveling and Last Played Date. The “Classification” page gives fields for Tempo, Mood, Occasion and Quality, plus 5 further user-customisable fields. It also shows which of your personal (chosen manually or automatically generated by use of combinations of criteria) playlists the track is in. The “Lyrics” page is self-explanatory, as is the “Album Art” page. The “Virtual CD” page allows you to set up previews of variable length of each track.
I don’t use any but the “Basic” and “Album Art” pages, personally. Where Album Art is not automatically generated, I copy and paste from Discogs, usually.
I’ve had a quick dabble with both Music Collector and Discogs and although they have their merits, they only work for me if I can import my existing spreadsheet information. I currently have my collection of more than 25,000 albums on my very basic spreadsheet (just artist, title and location) so there is no way that I’m going to enter all those, even with a barcode scanner. Music Collector seems to have very specific rule for importing .csv files which I can’t get to work for me. I can’t really work out how to do it on Discogs at all, but maybe I’m missing something.
I would like to make a shout for Music Collector. I appreciate it is now a subscription model (about £25 pa I think but they do tend to have periodic special offers to get 18m for 12m, that sort of thing.)
Personally I don’t mind paying for a product which evolves and is supported on a commercial basis. (There is a whole separate debate about what can be obtained for “free” (perhaps ad supported) and what you pay for. If I don’t feel I am being ripped off I would rather pay to support a service – e.g. journalism – rather than rely on free aggregators of news and expect ultimately that model to resource investigative or interesting reporting rather than click bait. Similarly, robust niche software. If a donation is mentioned I would contribute whilst I am fortunate to be able so to do.)
Anyway, back to the product. It allows entries to be updates, be searching online databases, scanning bar codes or manual entry. I have catalogued just over 8,000 LPs, CDs, Singles etc with, I would estimate, a 98% success rate of pulling in the correct information, covers etc. With a bit of patience the gaps can be manually filled.
You can import from iTunes by exporting a Library from iTunes (as xml) and importing to Music Collector. If you do it this way I believe you can also link the individual tracks and therefore use Music Collector as a means of finding and playing tracks (not the way I built up the database so can’t comment on practical application of this feature).
Like any software I probably only use maybe 25% of capability but it does the job for me.
There is a “lyrics” field which can be connected to tracks but I have never used. You can also link the tracks to stored mp3 files. I have just done this now for the first time and whilst it works would I imagine be impractical anything other than the odd track here and there as I don’t think there is a mapping facility (but see above for importing from iTunes)
You can have desktop, web and app versions. I have desktop and phone app which synchronise with each other so information is always to hand which is great for those moments you want to check something and not be restricted to needing to be at your computer.
Updating is always an issue but this I think I find easier than pure manual entry or exporting and tweaking from iTunes.
They also have (pretty much) identical products for films, books, games.
Years ago I started on Excel but it was just too inflexible and unwieldy and didn’t have the knowhow or patience to want to get into pivot tables or building a database. Maybe under lockdown circumstances I would have had the incentive to persevere!
(PS having been so far down the road with this have never tried Discogs which may have its virtues along with monitoring value (?) and being free but I suspect doent hold as much information about the artefact)
Another sout out for CLZ Music Collector, I also catalogue my books and dvd/blu-rays with their software. Any problems and the support is usually very quick and helpful.
HOORAY ANOTHER SHOUT OUT FOR MUSIC COLLECTOR – I have been using it for many a year & have a subs than expires in 2023, took advantage of one of their specials.
I cannot express how happy/grateful I am to MC – as it has great capacity to for you to add in manually as well auto I.D.ing CDs – Have over 50 folders going ranging from “Aussie Artists -7” E.P & LP records to Zero Tolerance Mag & CDs & all sorts in between -mag subs Mojo, Uncut, Relix,Paste, Classic Rock etc. MC also has the option for you to select record, cd, cassette search facilty. I have folders labelled as “New CDs” “2nd Hand Cds” etc.
Just to open “Old Wounds” I list my artists BY FIRST name – the trick there with MC is to select & edit by additional space between first & surname as it does tend to sort to surname if you do NOT set it as “default”.
Beefheart comes under “C” for Captain -surprise surprise.
Burn the Witch!
Spiral pad and pen.
You funny old thing you…
Thanks All. Now to put into action!
My first “database” was one of those alphabetical books and columns marked with a ruler.
I then manually transferred all this to Lotus 1-2-3 when I got my first PC.
As an exercise, I built my own database in Access 2.0 – then made it even better when I upgraded to Access 97.
The enhanced Access97 Database I had did contain all track listings, wither manually entered, or copied and pasted from discogs, amazon, or wherever.
It also had when and where it was purchased, and amount paid. (a harkback to my manual alphabet book).
I did use to have some software from Davilex, which purported to read your CDs and update with all information from it’s own database. It worked for a while (although track listings were hit and miss), but was probably usurped by iTunes. Plus, I didn’t do the job for vinyl.
Now I’ve just got an Excel file with as much as is useful information in it (and a load of Pivot Tables to filter/view stuff)
Not much use to anyone else but I created my own bespoke database nearly 20 years ago initially to teach myself how to use Access. The self-taught skills helped me get my first job.
I still use it as a record of my music, books, DVDs and Blu-ray collections, recording details like cost and when/where bought for each item, and whether I’ve listened/read/viewed it.
It creates nicely formatted lists of my collections which I used to print out and carry with me. When I eventually joined the smartphone world I added code to create my lists as pdfs which I save onto my phone. These remain invaluable when I’m shopping in a store or online to check I’m not about to buy something I already have.
It also builds tracklistings by scanning the music folder on my computer. That was just another exercise in working out how to do something, I’ve rarely ever had a use for the info in that table.
For many years upon arriving home from each spree as a £50 man I’d first log my new purchases, then start listening. These days I’m more lax tending to instead spend much of the night before any visit to Edinburgh or Glasgow updating the lists ready to refer to repeatedly whilst Fopping.
I find iTunes on my Mac to be pretty good at telling me what songs I own. It also plays them quite well.
*runs and hides*
@leedsboy
I think I love you.
I’ve never had a problem with iTunes.
You’ve got a Mac haven’t you?
Nope . My iTunes is on an old Windows 10 Toshiba laptop. Can be a bit laggy and a have the occasional problem but nothing that really hacks me off. Guess I’ll be buying a Fiio when the classic iPod finally calls it a day though,
… Is the correct answer!
Unless you spend a lot of time in the car and you car has CarPlay.