database for your classical music collection

[Baroque Obama]

Is there anyone experienced in CATraxx here? Especially editing xsl files and database tables?

[Old Listener]

Someone asked if there was anything better for cataloging a collection of classical music files.  I looked at a number of software programs and found JRiver Media Center to be the best fit by far.  It has secure tagging, powerful tag editing capabilities and a very configurable music player.  It allows me to use whatever tags I choose and to build custom views for browsing my collection.  Here is a view I use for classical music:

[Baroque Obama]

Someone asked if there was anything better for cataloging a collection of classical music files.  I looked at a number of software programs and found JRiver Media Center to be the best fit by far.  It has secure tagging, powerful tag editing capabilities and a very configurable music player.  It allows me to use whatever tags I choose and to build custom views for browsing my collection.  Here is a view I use for classical music:

I have been probing this for a while now. The expectations and needs for classical music collection management are, of course, subjective but as far as I'm concerned:
The best media players with collection management and customizable user interfaces are Mediamonkey and JRiver Media Center.
The best collection management and editing software is Collectorz Music Collector. CATraxx is much much better from any tool but it's quite technical and it's defunct. Both let you to select a media player of your choosing to play.
The best(easy and user-friendly) collection databases are MS Access and MS Excel. If you have time you can add links to excel to launch your tracks with your favorite media player

[SonicMan46]

I have been probing this for a while now. The expectations and needs for classical music collection management are, of course, subjective but as far as I'm concerned:
The best media players with collection management and customizable user interfaces are Mediamonkey and JRiver Media Center.
The best collection management and editing software is Collectorz Music Collector. CATraxx is much much better from any tool but it's quite technical and it's defunct. Both let you to select a media player of your choosing to play.
The best(easy and user-friendly) collection databases are MS Access and MS Excel. If you have time you can add links to excel to launch your tracks with your favorite media player

Well, has been nearly a year since my last response to this thread - wife & I have completely transitioned over to Apple computers since last spring, but I've still found no good solution to get my LARGE musical DBs off Access - still have my old PC in a back bedroom and can update Access there (but really silly to save an unwanted computer for that purpose) - I've been on many websites/forums and left a number of posts - there is just NOT an easy solution to this Access transition except to run Windows/Office on an Apple Mac (which requires using Boot Camp or a partition program such as Parallels) - I need to decide and will probably just export to Excel and bring into Numbers on my Macs - won't give me the beautiful printing forms that I've loved on Access, but still have not found a good solution!  Dave

[RJR]

If any of you are interested in docs, texts, cues, archives, pictures (gifs & jpegs), cd covers, music sheets, pdfs or collections to supplement or add to your classical music (or jazz, blues, etc) files then I suggest that you download Emule. Type in the name of the composer, solo artist, chamber group, orchestra or conductor and you will find some gems. It is a free download.

[mc ukrneal]

So I have been tooling around with Musichi based on a mention by Jens. And it is quite powerful, in that for a large collection, it provides numerous and clear ways to organize your collection. There a numerous good reasons to go with it. And it cuts down the entering of track by track info. In the past, if the disc were not recognized, I might enter 'Tosca disc 1' for all tracks (as place holder until I have time to go back, but never do), because who wants to enter 15 tracks of a foreign language? With Musichi, there is almost always a way to avoid the hand entering of text. And that alone is a tremendous time saver (and makes the information that is digitized much more useful). The large database of classical composers and works (not complete, but pretty good) is a huge help too. They include far more info than I would ever include by hand (some of which I am happy to add - like year of work). And the ease of normalizing everything so they are identical is nice too.

But there are some downsides for me (which I am posting here in case there are some fixes for them in case I have not yet seen them in my trial period):
1. The biggest - no gapless playing. For a collection with lots of opera (and choral pieces), this is an issue. In order to do gapless (according to the email response from the publisher), I would have to use an external player (like foobar or media monkey).
2. The player has a clunky feel. It's just not as polished a look as some (though admittedly, there are others that are worse).
3. it does take some time to get a hang of the system.

Here was my thinking - now that external disc sizes have increased, I have been thinking of converting to FLAC. I already have a mix. But with Musichi (if I decide to use it), I could rip to FLAC, convert another set of files to mp3 and then I would have both all ready to go depending on my needs. With #1 being an issue, I would probably continue to use Windows Media Player for mp3 listening, but would need to find a different player for FLAC (or some combo of programs). I like the look of the cover view in the Windows Player. Incidentally, the converted mp3 files require minimal changes to make them exactly like my existing organizational system (or none at all if I don't care). And as time goes on, they'll all be identical anyway. And as time goes on, maybe I'll drop mp3 entirely.

Just writing this out has been helpful, but perhaps other members can comment more on various programs (and this thread has been helpful too).

[mc ukrneal]

From your link, I downloaded the trial version of this software to see if it worked for me. After an hour or two of playing around with it, I think so far that it seems to work pretty well. With only 100 database entries in the trial I couldn't check out how it worked with big chunks of data, but I cataloged 3 or 4 disks and a couple of folders of MP3's and FLAC's. It was fast and easy, and the CD's were in their database already, which was nice. The album art search feature worked well too. I'll probably go ahead and buy the $30 version and have at it. Thanks for that,

Gurn - how did this work out for you? I like the graphical side of this one. It might be fun...

EDIT: and do you use the CLZ CLoud backup? That has potential, but uploading so many GB/TB may be an issue?

[Gurn Blanston]

Gurn - how did this work out for you? I like the graphical side of this one. It might be fun...

EDIT: and do you use the CLZ CLoud backup? That has potential, but uploading so many GB/TB may be an issue?

Neal,

Pro's: Basically what I wrote above, it works well and seems pretty intuitive to use.

Con's: Sitting there for hours with my CD's and running each one through the system so the barcode could scan was right out. I did a few and they worked well, but starting from scratch when you already have thousands of CD's is too time consuming. They have a USB scanner that will read the disks right in the box, but I didn't make that investment. For folders of MP3's and FLAC's it worked well, but there again, I have half a terabyte of digital files and it is a time consuming process.

I don't have cloud backup, for just the issue you raise. I have satellite broadband since I live so far from civilization, and the data limits make it clearly impossible to use the cloud. For people with something like fiber optic with no data limits, it would be the way to go, I think, as long as you are confident your cloud provider isn't going to go belly-up next week and make you lose everything.

[Mirror Image]

I have not seen any CD cataloging program that has been easy to use and that actually does a good job. There should be a program designed to allow you to sort your music collection through a search engine which allows you to pull the covers and information about the album from a website. If there's a program like this already in existence, then please LET ME KNOW NOW!!! I've been waiting years for something like this to happen.

[Artem]

I use https://rateyourmusic.com off and on, but one must be really dedicated to adding classical works, composers and performers into the database of that site which also must be approved by moderators and sometimes that can take up to several months. A new version of this site is coming soon, so maybe it will be easier to navigate through classical music on it.