Music Cataloguing systems - Any ideas folks

Hi guys
Just wondering (To those of you who have a larger collection of music than a simple Ipod) what do you use for cataloguing / retrieving tracks / albums or do you "Roll your Own" app

My big problem with "Proprietary" Catalguing systems - is that apart from the way a lot of them insist you have music encoded in some special format there usually is no easy way to retrieve a slew of tracks easily and quickly.

Say I want to run a query like "find first 50 tracks with the words Honey Love in the title issued between 1965 and 1970 and exclude artists Roy Orbison and Lionel Ritchie" No current system I've found will do this (BTW not that I've got any thing against those two individuals -- just an example.

Or I want all tracks performed by "The London Symphony Orchestra" or all tracks conducted by "Bernard Haitink" etc.

And the mega show stopper of all is most library systems I've seen DON'T SPAN DISC VOLUMES.

I've dedicated 3 entire disk volumes for music. I store mainly in FLAC but sometimes in ATRAC (Sony Minidisc format) and OGG.

What I'm thinking of doing is creating a MySQL database with the "track meta information" and a link to the disc directory its on . By the meta information I can store the "Query tags" such as the fields I want to interrogate.

The main problem of doing this of course is to ensure the MySQL database is always up to date. However since I've "ripped" almost my entire CD collection I won't be updating this too much in future.

I never purchase Music from Itunes etc -- why pay for "compressed Music".

I upload stuff occasionally from Real time recording at Gigs (the old Minidisc is SUPERB - Still no competitor out there yet for this) and can handle this manually - not a huge amount.

Anybody know possibly of a decent facility that would allow me to do this easily rather than the MySQL method.

The absolute essentials are : (All 3 required)

1) SPANNING DISKS (i.e multiple disks allowed for the DB)
2) Music can be stored in format(s) of my choice -- not restricted to a single codec.
3) Meta data must be simple to add such as Artist, title, etc etc.

Cheers

jimbo

Hi there

Looks good -- thanks.

I've used this as a Media playing system a while ago and liked it then but I never thought of it as a "cataloguing system" -- there's some great info in this.

I'll compare this with what I'm already doing -- If i get the MySQL stuff working I can post the queries so others can create the tables / copy the application.

MySQL is Free and the great thing is it works on Linux / Windows / Macs etc etc. The server can be ANYWHERE indpendent of where the music is actually installed.


If I get the MySQL database working I can possibly also use this also to stream music around the house -- but that's not a high priority.

Cheers
jimbo

I just organise my music on the hd by artist then album, its easy to navigate.

Jaikoz might work for you and offers lots of different ways tagging on lots of codecs.
It collects missing metadata from the MusicBrainz server.
Atrac might be a problem. So might excluding Roy Orbison and Lionel Ritchie. LOL
About €15 after a months trial.

swarfega said:

I just organise my music on the hd by artist then album, its easy to navigate.

Hi there I think you mis-read my OP.

The MAIN THING I WANT (CAPS intended) is for the library to SPAN MULTIPLE VOLUMES. The volumes might be on a Network or ANYWHERE. I want to be able to access the music from ANY computer on the network (or even remotely).

You say you just organise on the HD -- I might have a LOT of HD's to do this stuff -- also organising by Artist isn't that easy either -- just say you are organising a Classical Music collection

Who is the Artist -- The Symphony orchestra, The composer, The soloists (if any), the Conductor.

What also if the artist is represented in many albums or compilations.

It's NOT so easy to manage this stuff.

Unlike simple collections this stuff has a lot of MANY to MANY relationships.

Hi Laptopdog -- the Musicbrainz server isn't that good for metadata for Classical Music metatags.

The best allround server is the Gracenote CDDB (for CD metatags). Freedb is also good.

Once I've ripped most of the CD's I can always manually add new metatags.

Cheers
jimbo

Hi there
Thanks for all the suggestions.

ATRAC I only use for some Legacy stuff -- the latest (?) minidisc recorder RH1 uses WAV and MP3 as well.

I'm not a big fan of Windows Media player as it does all sorts of "Phoning Home" to "Daddy" in Redmond to check on what you are playing, whether you have the rights for it and whether you've messed around with any DRM.

WMP doesn't EXPLICITLY say this of course -- it just says Data is sent to Microsoft for "purely informational" purposes with a view to "enhancing the customers Windows experience".

Anyway thanks everybody there's enougfh stuff here to go on with.

Cheers
jimbo