Music Collection Databases

You should try Delicious Library. Cool program. Costs $40.

http://www.delicious-monster.com/

On their help page (third question down), they say it imports data from other programs. They also say they'll reduce the price if you own a competing product.

-Dave

You should give CDpedia a try.

http://www.bruji.com/cdpedia/

It doesn't directly import AudioFile files, but will import tab-
delimited or comma-delimited files. A few nice features from the
data inputing point of view:

- It will import album data (including cover art) from iTunes.
- It will perform a search on Amazon.com (not just US) & Tower
- It will scan the CD in the drive, and perform a look up on FreeDB

Nice (iTunes like) interface as well.

Tn

I was just working with MyMusic. Although it has a few glitches (minor and easily worked around), it is much more than a CD collection list. It also includes the ability to have individual tracks listed along with their times. The total play time of the CD. Price. Genre. Comments form AMG as well as Amazon and more. What work is there to do this? Just click on an icon (I just asked them to make it a Command key thingie), enter the name of the CD and/or the Artist, hit RETURN, select your item from the Amazon and/or AMG (I use both), when the data appears from on line all you do is click a button and ALL of the CD info is there! Also, the reports are many.

Interesting chat - hope you don't mind my butting in.

I've been looking for something similar to what you describe to allow me to choose a song from the 27k I have on my iTunes server (aka an old G4 that lives under a set of shelves, is wired in to my 5.1 receiver, has approximately 400Gb of hard drives in and has a 15" flat screen monitor connected which sits on an eye-level shelf courtesy of some long cables).

What I'd like is an old-fashioned catalogue that allows me to view alphabetically by artist a thumbnail CD cover and the entire tracklisting for that album.

But, I also want to be able to do this in alphabetical sections, to allow me to easily, for example, print a new "R" section (or pages) when I purchase a new Radiohead album. So I don't have to either re-print 100s of pages or have an addendum section for every new CD I buy or download.

I thought it would be so simple to find something but, as yet, I've found nothing to do what I thought would be a simple task.

Help!

TIA

RB

You should try Delicious Library. Cool program. Costs $40.

http://www.delicious-monster.com/

I also use Audiofile in Classic with more than 2300 CDs and LPs cataloged in it.

I've tested all of the programs mentioned above, and I don't think any of them are worthy of replacing my Audiofile. I'd love to see some developer come up with a MacOS X version of Audiofile, or something close to it. I don't know why Spinfree, Audiofile's developer, didn't port it to OS X. It seems to me they could have sold a lot of copies. But for some reason, they didn't and they apparently never intend to. Why can't somebody else do it?

I consider it (primarily its layout) so much better than what's out there now that I keep Classic running on my Mac for this one app, and I have resigned myself to having to type in the info for new CD acquisitions.

Andrew Cohen wrote:

> I heartily second the recommendation. The coolest thing about
> Delicious Librarym is its ability to scan the bar codes off of most
> books, CD, DVD, or game. You can use an iSight camera or a
> Firewire-enabled video camera. I've been impressed with how often it
> gets an exact match -- even when typing in the ISBN numbers for some
> rather old pre-bar code books.

you can also buy a product called cuecat scanner for about $7 on the
web. Pulling up pin 5 converts the device into a commerical bar code
scanner, which I've used quite happily with delicous library for some time.

http://www.cexx.org/cuecat.htm#usb

Paul

--On August 2, 2005 5:30:46 PM -0700 Paul Guinnessy <pkgmac.com> wrote:

> you can also buy a product called cuecat scanner for about $7 on the web.
> Pulling up pin 5 converts the device into a commerical bar code scanner,
> which I've used quite happily with delicous library for some time.
>
> http://www.cexx.org/cuecat.htm#usb

The main reasons I've held off buying Delicious Library are 1) the wireless
bar code scanner is expensive, my books are downstairs (or in my parents
garage, much to their displeasure) so a wired device is of limited use. 2)
They don't do comic books yet.

For #1 I've requested they support getting bar codes from digital cameras.
I can take my Zire 72 with built-in camera downstairs, snap hundreds of
pictures of bar codes. Come back upstairs and suck them in.

#2 I can wait on, so if they fix #1 I'll pony up and start using Delicious
Library.

On Aug 2, 2005, at 4:18 PM, ross wrote:

> What I'd like is an old-fashioned catalogue that allows me to view
> alphabetically by artist a thumbnail CD cover and the entire
> tracklisting for that album.
>
> But, I also want to be able to do this in alphabetical sections, to
> allow me to easily, for example, print a new "R" section (or pages)
> when I purchase a new Radiohead album. So I don't have to either re-
> print 100s of pages or have an addendum section for every new CD I
> buy or download.

Like you, I have looked quite hard for a catalog printing solution,
and I agree with you that generating printed catalogs should be much
easier than it is. But with some work, it is possible to generate a
reasonably good looking catalog.

First, the really easy option. Use the Print Album Listings feature
in iTunes. This actually does a pretty good job. It produces a
nicely formatted print out with the art work in thumbnail and all the
info you ask for. If you just want to print a subset of the artists,
you can create a smart playlist with appropriate criteria (e.g. just
the R's), and just print off the smart playlist. The only problem
the Print Album Listing layout is not customizable, and currently
only lets you sort by album title, not by artist. I suppose you
could overload the title field in iTunes with the Artist info (say
like "Artist: Album Name"), but that is hardly elegant. But if you
can live with this limitation, this is by far the easiest way to go.

The other option is to use CDpedia. CDpedia will import info from
iTunes, and export a catalog to HTML. CDpedia comes with good export
templates---and will do all that you ask (sort by artist, include
artwork in thumbnail, and all the other album info). But, you can go
even further and create/customize a layout to your own liking (as
long as you know rudimentary HTML). Moreover, CDpedia has a "smart
collections" feature which is similar to iTunes "smart playlists"
feature, so you can print out a catalog of any subset of your
collection (e.g. just the R's).

A minor problem with the CDpedia route is that it generates HTML
pages, and printing HTML is a bit hit-or-miss. Safari will not
intelligently handle HTML tables in printed output, so you tend to
get page breaks in the middle of an album entry. (Basically, each
album entry occupies a row in a large HTML table). IE actually
handles table printing much better since it tries not to break rows
across two pages, and works well for this purpose.

I have gotten consistently good results using CDpedia with a template
customized specifically for print catalogs, printing the results from
IE. It produces a nice catalog with 4-5 albums per page. I have
tried a few other programs like iTunes Catalog, but IMHO CDpedia
gives you much greater flexibility and produces nicer output with
relatively little effort.

Tn

I also use MyMusic in OS 9 and have been very happy with it. However I recently had my hard drive crash and when attempting to download the program from Computer Dynamics, it appears they are no longer in business. If any of you have a copy of the installer (1idontcare maybe?) for MyMusic v2.5.3 I would greatly appreciate you emailing it to me. Please contact me at Rainier_dhotmail.com and I can advise of an address that will accept the program attachment. Thanx in advance! Rainier

I've used iTunes Catalog, but of course this only works if you've loaded all your stuff into iTunes first (which I have, a long boring and occasionally painful process).

But what I want is a way to put that catalog into my Palm. I tried playing with this for an hour or two using iTunes Catalog and a JFile import program, but didn't have any real luck.

As a result, I ended up buying Yet Another duplicate CD, in part because it was re-released on a mid-priced label. (Anyone interested in a brand new copy of Biber's "Mensa Sonora", still shrink-wrapped, as performed by Musica Antiqua Koeln???)

Anyone have any suggestions/successes getting catalog info from iTunes into Palms?

dave

At 7:41 pm -0800 21/11/2005, deemery wrote:
>Anyone have any suggestions/successes getting catalog info from
>iTunes into Palms?

I did this once by importing the iTunes XML catalogue file into a
spreadsheet, creating an Excel-compatible file, and then transferring
that to the Palm environment using Documents To Go.

However, with over 7000 entries the catalogue was so painfully slow
on my humble Handspring Visor that it was more a proof of concept
than an everyday utility!

If you're PHP-minded, though, you could use SQLTunes (VersionTracker)
to automate and create HTML output, customised to whatever your
requirement.

Chris

Chris Reed, BBR Solutions Ltd * http://www.bbr-online.com