Inventory of vinyl - what software do you use?


I am finally going to inventory my records this winter, or so I hope. I am wondering what software applications other Audiogoners use for this task. A specialized vinyl inventory program? MS Access or other database program? Also, what categories do you find most useful to keep a record of, besides Artist and Album name, condition of vinyl, record label, etc.?

I am not looking forward to this task but it is necessary, I think. I have been putting it on the back burner for way too long, out of pure laziness. I would like user-friendly software, with the ability to sort by field.

Please tell me what you use!

Holly
oakiris
I'm wondering if Excel is the way to go, relative to Access. How well does Excel allow you to do filtering and create custom lists (or reports). I'm an Excel lover - I've gotten it to do lots of things - but I haven't explored that aspect of its functionality. I would think Access would be better - you could even create a data input form for each record, and other forms to upgrade condition, etc. Comments?
I have enjoyed using Music Label 2006 (now 2007).The cool thing is it ties into Amazon databases here and in England,Germany,France,and Canada. Quite often a picture of the album cover will pop up along with the song names.You can download a trial version for free at downloads.com or cnet and try it for a couple of weeks.If you like it I think it was around $40.(one time fee).I tried a few others but this was the easiest/quickest.When you are done you can convert to HTML and post your list on the internet.
MS Access in use here. My collection is 80% classical and I wanted something I could set up as a relational database rather than a flat file given the multiple performances I wanted to track. If my collection were largely non-classical, then I would have used Excel and been very happy with the results. At this point, Access is tracking well over 4,000 LPs and over 13,000 individual works. For portability, I pull a report into Excel format to carry on my Palm.

The fields I use are:

- Composer
- Composer Dates
- Composer Period (Ancient, Baroque, Romantic, etc)

- Title of work
- Genre (orchestral, chamber, choral, etc)
- Type (Classical, Jazz, Blues, Rock, etc)
- Artists (conductor, orchestra, solists, etc. A single field for all since it can be easily searched and filtered.)

- Record Label
- Record Number
- Format (LP, CD, etc)
- Replacement Cost (for insurance purposes)
- Replacement Cost information source
- Filed Under (where the heck did I put that?)
- Comment (in which goes any information about pressing, recording engineer, etc.)

Since all of these fields can be searched and filtered, I can pull any subset of information I've been able to want or imagine.

And to Dan_ed's point about backup, I store both local and remote backup copies. The remote backups are stored on my accounts with my local ISP, my Yahoo email account and my Gmail email account. (Yes, overkill.)
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Excel will let you easily do sorting, filtering, custom reporting, development of labels (Excel plus Word) and pretty much anything else your hear desires. A full database would seem to be overkill to me unless your collection exceeds the 65536 rows currently allowed in Excel (I'm only at 1000 rows myself) but it mostly depends on which program you are most familiar with Excel or Access. Either one will more than do the job.