Inventory of vinyl - what software do you use?
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.) . |
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. |
I have 8,000 LPs of which 75% are classical. I am currently using Visual FoxPro, though when I get the time I will switch over to FileMaker. You could use any spreadsheet or other flat file data base. However, you will have a lot of redundancy, paarticularly if you have a lot of classical albums. Since the files are small, performance will not suffer. However, you will need a lot of extra key strokes to enter the same amount of data versus a relational data base. For many of the fields in my data bases I have choices set up (mono/stereo) (33 1/3/45) (classical/movie/show/rock/pop) so that just one click is required to enter the data. If you are familiar with a relational data base such as MS Access and you have a more than 1,000 albums I would think you could save yourself a lot of data entry time by using the relational data base. Fields In Manufacturer File: Record Label Secondary label (Shaded Dog/White Dog/Dead Dog, etc.) Stamper Number Manufacturer's Number Genre (movie/classical/rock, etc.) Price Artist Title Key (for linking data bases) Condition Speed Number of disks Fields in Album File Stereo or Mono Composer Title Conductor Orchestra Year Filed under Category (solo violin, violin concerto, guitar, wind, etc. Performer Key |
