Help an idiot find a software solution/program to archive/index his 400+ mp3/cdr's. (way more inside)

October 8, 2005 10:50 AM

additional details and requirements

I have about 400+ cdr's with mp3's on them. I simply have them numbered 1-400 and store them in a gigantor cd wallet.

All i want to do is:
- pop in the cdr
- label or name it in the program as (ie: cd1, cd2, etc.)
- The program would then scan the mp3's and list them within each cd-r volume.
- So when I want to load up my 20gb mp3 player (not an Ipod) I can simply search or query for the Pixies and it would return that I have the pixies songs located on
cd23, cd97 and cd259.
- preferably freeware, but at this point if it does the job reliably i will pay of course.

I have no need:
- for CDDB or Amazon tagging since all of the mp3's when they were ripped were tagged accurately and completely, and a lot of files are radio shows, unsigned music groups, bootlegs, unreleased or live shows that have no listings at these sites.
- I care not about album photo's, lyrics, bitrate, compression % or genre playlist type of indexing.
- I don't need an integrated player, tagger playlist dj music chooser or anything that these software suites offer.
- I am not catalogueing (sic) vinyl, cassettes or vhs, just mp3's and some .wav files.

The reason I am reaching out to my fellow Mefites is that I can't be the only one with this dilemma. Some of you may have employed external hard drives or use Itunes to handle your music archiving needs, but i simply want an easy way to know what I have and where it is.

And i'm noticing how fragile cdr's are with scratches and whatnot,I want to only handle them if I will be pulling tracks off of them on to my pc to load up in the player. I don't wantto individually pop them in and out of the cdrom drive to see what's on this one and what's on that one.

I have tried Helium, media monkey, music collectorz and a whole bunch of other "popular and indispensable" suites and have come up way short. The closest I came to the simplicity of what I was looking for was cdtree(http://www.vbknowledgesolutions.com/) and I purchased a copy from them for like $20.

The problem is that my serial doesn't take now that I have tried to reinstall it. I have emailed them for support, but I am planning ahead in case they can't help me and I need to find another program.
I was an early adopter of off loading my mp3's onto cdr'sand cd tree was the first program I found that did what I needed, but I figured that 5 years later there must have been someone else who has put a program together better andleaner and less prone to crashing and stalling like cdtree.

I am also going to transfer the cdr's to dvd-r to maximize space. This will put the 400 cd's on about 50 dvd-r.
I apologize in advance for the longwinded question.

posted by stavx to computers & internet (12 comments total)

damn!! I messed up the question box

It should have read
"Help an idiot find a software solution/program to archive/index his 400+ mp3/cdr's. (way more inside)"

i'm sorry folks
posted by stavx at 10:52 AM on October 8, 2005

1) Mac or PC?

2) How are the mp3s organised? By folder? (Artist / Album / 01.mp3)
posted by Marquis at 10:57 AM on October 8, 2005

PC and 95% are organized artist/album folder
with the rest are free floating singles and standalone entities.
posted by stavx at 10:59 AM on October 8, 2005

I'd like the answer for Mac.
posted by dobbs at 11:03 AM on October 8, 2005

If I understand you correctly, you want a program that will automatically catalog your CD-Rs and their contents?

I use DiskTracker (Mac only). It has no mp3-specific functions: it scans a disc and then remembers all the folders, subfolders and files. I can then search for "Pixies", find all the CDs with files that include that term, and drill down to see what in specific the file/folder is.

Is that what you want? I am sure lots of PC equivalents exist.
posted by Marquis at 11:08 AM on October 8, 2005

Disktracker seems to be the ticket. But now I'm on the search for PC version equivalent.
posted by stavx at 11:19 AM on October 8, 2005

I second the DiskTracker recommendation for the Mac users reading this.

Yes, its interface is chillingly OS 7-ish, but its database is rock-solid and very fast. I track hundreds of CDRs with it using the same database file going back 6 or 7 years and it has always served me well.

The problem, stavx, may be that you are stuck on the idea of "cataloging music" rather than searching for a utility for simply "cataloging files"--once you've got a directory structure that includes artist, album name & song name, you don't really need to think about the ID3 tags at all. So maybe try searching for a general backup-disc scanning utility.
posted by bcwinters at 11:29 AM on October 8, 2005

I'll do it for you for $200!

Seriously, 400 CD-Rs * 700MB = 280GB (technically 273-ish). Why not get a couple 200 GB hard drives and be done with it, instead of trotting out a bunch of CD-Rs or DVD-Rs whenever you want to listen to a song?
posted by revgeorge at 12:24 PM on October 8, 2005

I second revgeorge's advice. If you want to go the long route though, this is something I'd write a custom perl script for. Even for someone relatively new to perl, it would seriously take maybe 20 minutes to write a program to process the CDs, and depending on how complex you wanted the recovery (a simple grep would be dead easy) another 15 or 20 to write a little recovery script.

Emails in the profile if you want to go this route & don't know perl.
posted by devilsbrigade at 1:02 PM on October 8, 2005

DiskBase is exactly what you're looking for.

In over 10 years of indexing media on the PC, I have yet to find an application as simple, fast and sensible as Diskbase.

Plus, the author has recently made the app Freeware (no spyware or ads, either...you can't beat that)
posted by melorama at 1:15 PM on October 8, 2005

And as far as Mac solutions go, I have found that Neometric's Catalog is the closest equivalent to DiskBase I have tried. I know lots of people like DiskTracker, but I found it to be lacking (not being able to rename a scanned disk is a dealbreaker for me), and not to mention ugly as sin, interface-wise.
posted by melorama at 1:21 PM on October 8, 2005

Cathy [homepage] is a tiny little tool that does exactly what you describe and doesn't require an installation. Just download the .exe and start cataloging. The interface is a bit clumsy, but you get used to it.
posted by mumble at 3:35 PM on October 8, 2005