Cataloging Music CDs

I use MediaMonkey. It can be used to just catalogue your CDs like you want (including sorting) but also has an excellent player.

You can also use it to rip your CDs to various formats, then use MediaMonky like a jukebox to play all your music at will without having to insert your CDs one at a time. You can set up playlists with any number of tracks (you can pick and choose individual tracks or use entire CDs to fill a playlist).

If I understand correctly it would be better to import tracks to your music library then use something like TagScanner to export the album/ track list in csv file format that any database application should be able to import. You don't say which database application you use.

On the download page you'll find a portable version of TagScanner that can be downloaded.

Choose file format to export.

I don't think you will have much luck unless you get the songs off of CD and onto your hard drive--one way or another, in one file format or another.

I use Media Monkey to play and catalog and everything I have is in mp3 format. About 27,000 individual songs. I also use Excel separately to keep track of what I have.

You can use Media Monkey's "create report" function to export everything in it's database to Excel. Once the songs are listed in Excel, they can be sorted by any of the columns.

Whether or not you have a populated composer field shown in Media Monkey depends on your tags. I don't care about composer, so my composer tags are poor and typically blank. But I am very careful about artist, title, and length tags and you can see that those columns are fully populated in this screen shot.

This screen shot is of the Media Monkey report as exported to Excel, showing a sort by title (Column C, shown in blue). You could just as easily sort by any other column.

I'd guess any semi-competent media player has some sort of report maker that can export to Excel.

motim said:

But when connected to the internet it retrieves the info of the cd, on some occasions the info is wrong (checked and double checked) - the info displayed is not what really is on the disc - it does not match the list on the cd envelope...............


Second - I started to build my own catalog using microsoft office excel, its a lot of typing, some day it will be done.

The info from the Internet is always problematic and prone to errors. I don't rely on it at all.

Music playback, management, and cataloging is much easier if the music is on your hard drive rather than on CD and that's the first choice you have to make.