Organize my recreation!
December 5, 2020 9:59 AM   Subscribe

You love to consume media - podcasts, tv, movies, books, video games, all of it. You like to keep a running list of what you want to watch/read/listen to in a simple and easy way. Tell me how you do it!

More info: I am completely in love with the idea of the app Sofa: Downtime Organizer which lets you track a list of books, movies, podcasts, and tv that you want to consume. But it's iOS only and I'm not an Apple user. I'm looking for a good alternative!

What I really love about Sofa: lets you easily move things from the "to-read/watch/listen" pile to the "read/watched/listened" pile; has a little snippet about each media item so you can remind yourself what it is; lets you put multiple kinds of media on the "to do" pile unlike, for instance, Letterboxed, which is only for movies. What's out there that duplicates some of this functionality?

(I'm already deeply embedded in Goodreads, so I don't necessarily need a option that does books.)
posted by WidgetAlley to Media & Arts (2 answers total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is maybe not at all what you want, but I just keep a text file for each type of media (books, movies, tv, other), and each text file has a sections like "want to watch" and "have watched". I move a line from one section to the other when I've watched/read a thing. I usually just record the person who recommended the media to me, but occasionally I'll record something else as well.

I use Syncthing so I can edit it on my phone, but Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive/something else might work better for you, since Syncthing can be a bit fiddly to set up.

I'm sure this will get unsustainable at some point (I have around 100 books on my want-to-read list right now, and it's constantly growing), but for now it works just fine. I can't do anything fancy like sorting by author or date or genre, but for me, just looking through a list works well enough.
posted by wesleyac at 4:49 PM on December 5, 2020


Sofa definitely looks better than anything I found for Android.

- Movies and TV together seems pretty doable: JustWatch (app/web) is a nice way to track this across streaming services, and most of that watchlist/search functionality has been added to the (maybe installed already) Google TV / Movies app.
- Games across platforms, there are a ton of backlog trackers. Best ones seem to be web sites, but there's a bunch of apps that all look about the same, and I can't pick one out as the best.
- All together: I tried a bunch of keywords until I stumbled on "collection". My Collections seems like you could contort it into something closer to Sofa with custom fields and whatnot.

On reflection, maybe freeform notes or a to-do app are the best options on Android? Most to-do apps could have tags and links and whatnot to categorize into movie/tv/game.
posted by Anonymous Function at 8:40 PM on December 5, 2020


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