MediaMan - Catalog Your Collection
Monday 30 October 2006 at 1:41 pm. We have accumulated lots of cd's collected over many many years. A rough estimate was 'about' 600.After upping our home & contents insurance policy we decided we needed to figure out exactly how many we actually had and what they were.
There are a bunch of ways to do this - I have a Rateyourmusic (free online web-based music catalog) profile with almost 300 CD's in it; we could also just manually put them into Access or Excel. Thats pretty painful for so many CD's and it also doesn't give you all the goodies available nowadays via internet database lookups.
I'd heard about a few different media management applications - I was keen to try Delicious Library on my MacBook and there were a few tools available for Windows too (that didn't look quite so nice but offered the same functionality).
A key requirement is to be able to use a handheld barcode reader to enable a data lookup on the scanned CD. We popped down to the local gadget store and picked up a cheap $90 hand scanner - it was PS/2 only (there was a passthrough for the keyboard) so we also bought a USB keyboard/mouse adaptor.
Unfortunately the USB adaptor seemed to munge the input on both a PC and Mac laptop - oddly the keyboard and mouse work fine through it. Turns out theres a super special USB adaptor that is specifically designed for use with the scanner - we ended up returning the adaptor and just using the scanner on a desktop with a PS/2 port.
Since it didn't work easily via USB (although I could have used the MacBooks built in camera too) we needed to find a decent PC media management application. We found MediaMan which was surprisingly similar to Delicious Library. After trying out a few CD's to verify it worked with the scanner we paid the shareware fee and put it to use.
So far we have 550 CD's in the database and about 50 which weren't recognised (the scanned barcode is cross-referenced to Amazon USA/UK) and will have to be manually entered. We also added 110 DVD's - the vast majority of these had to be manually looked up - I suspect the barcodes on the back are region specific. We also started adding some books into the database - every single one was properly identified.
If an item isn't detected via barcode you can search by artist, author, title etc and select the item from a picklist. The great advantage of having the item referenced from Amazon is that the database is automatically propogated with a cover picture, title, artist, author, track-list and reviews. Putting that information in manually would take at least 15 to 30min per item.
There are some excellent export options (csv, rtf, html and even png for a rendered media shelf) but unfortunately no import options (you can't import from csv).
Between manual data entry and the barcode scanner we managed to do almost all our CD's and DVD's in about three hours. The rest of our books we'll leave for a rainy day
Of course the really scarey part is when you export a csv, pull it into excel and add up the amount of money (each item from Amazon is imported into the database complete with its price field) spent on little silver discs . . .
