Inventory of vinyl - what software do you use?

I too have been cataloging my vinyl, but it never even occured to me look for specific software. Thats what spreadsheets are for and I use Excel. The nice thing about Excel is you can lay it out any way you like, with as much or as little space as your specific catagory requires, and you can play around with fonts, font size and color, bold, underlined, etc. Another nice thing about Excel is you can use as many 'sheets' as you like to organize different catagories of music. Excel 2003, which I use, defaults to three sheets, but you can set it up to as many as you like. If you've not used Excel it is easy enough to figure out the basic functions even though it has levels of complexity most of us will never need or even know about. For example I have used it for making frequency graphs for plotting the in room frequency response of my Talon Khorus loudspeakers. While cataloging your LP's can turn into a huge task (I have well over 1000 LP's) it is actually kind of fun once you get started. It's also a great opportunity to go through albums you may have forgotten about. If you have Microsoft Excel on your computer I can send you a copy of my inventory which you can use as a template if that would help get you started. Just send me a private email.

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 haven't tried this but it might be what you are looking for. Gracenote has a bunch of audio type programs.

http://www.gracenote.com/partners/software/players.html?OS=win&pl_version=&langs=&payment=&type=all&player=AVCataloger

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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