[grrr223]

I have 250 CDs and growing (thanks to my new CD burner) which is even small compared to some of you here. Now, finding most songs isn't a problem, you look for the band's CD and find what track number it is. Simple right? My problem is with the 40 (and growing even faster thanks to my colleges extensive music library) classical music CDs I own, many of which are compiliations and "best of" CDs of various artists, performers, and genres. My problem is How do I find which CDs have my 5 different copies of Pachabel's Canon in D Major on them? I assume that many of you also share this problem, I'm looking to see how you solve it.

I have a Sony 400 disc CD player which has the incredible feature of being able to enter in the CD title and artist name for each disc (if they're not already on the CD with CD-text) and searching for your cd by either of these methods. Unfortunately, this doesn't help me search for individual songs. One way I could do this is to rip all my CDs as MP3s and sort them that way, and if I wanted to listen to the CD through my good stereo system (or cans) I would be able to see which CD it was on right there. But I don't really have the hard drive space to do that.

Another way is to maybe create a database of the same thing which is almost the same. While you can't listen to them on the fly, it takes up about 1000th the HD space. If I were to go this route, are there any easy ways (besides typing them all in, I don't like typing) to catalog the tracks on all these CDs? I have a Mac if that helps narrow down the suggestions. MacDef sent me a cool little CD database file in Filemaker, but I guess I'm looking for an easy way to get the info into the database.

So, lets talk about how we solve this problem, and hopefully others will be helped in the future.

 

[MacDEF]

grrr, I should send you the latest version of my database -- I changed it up quite a bit to make it easier to enter and more useful.

As for getting the info in there, I just put in a CD, let iTunes look up the CDDB data, then select all, copy, and paste into BBEdit. There I strip out everything but the track names, then past them into the "tracks" field in the database. Sounds complicated but just takes a few seconds. I've cataloged all of my various artists, soundtracks, etc. -- I had the same problem as you!

I've now moved onto single-artist albums. Pretty soon I'll have the whole collection catalogued.

 

[shivohum]

Use Music Collector from Collectorz.com. Just snap in a CD, use CDDB to look it up, and it will add the CD to your database. Couldn't be simpler.

It has fields for tracks, publisher, label, title, notes, and everything else I could think of...

 

[KR...]

I just keep a simple DOC file on Word with everything I own. Everytime I get a new CD it gets added to the list.

 

[grrr223]

Well everyone, thank you for your suggestions, but I found a solution. I now use Audiofile for all of my CD catalogging needs. It was created in Filemaker, but it is a standalone application so you don't actually need Filemaker to use it. It is also both Mac and PC compatible for those of you not fortunate enough to own a Mac in addition to your kick ass headphones

.

All you have to do is insert the CD and it looks it up in CDDB and adds all the track information automatically. It has fields for EVERYTHING you could imagine. For example, you can list guest artists, composer, song writer, and stuff for each SONG. The interface is great. It's so fast too.

My only compliant (being quite proficient with Filemaker) is that, since it's a stand alone app, you can't edit it's long list of reports, or the different ways it prints. Is there anyway to crack the encryption in Filemaker? Anyone? If I get really bored over Christmas break, I might just recreate the program in a new Filemaker file that I can do whatever I want with.

It's worth the $20 no questions asked. Although if you look hard enough for a program called surfers serialz (I'd suggest hotline) you can get around that.