What is the best Windows application for creating reports of digital music collections?

April 4, 2004 7:40 PM

What is the best Windows application for creating reports of digital music collections? I need it to support both MP3 and AAC. I would prefer customizable HTML output but would settle for Text. I have tried several popular applications but none have supported AAC and their reporting capabilites have been minimal. I am looking for something that can create reports with just artist and album titles as well as the more typical every file/song reports.
posted by agregoli to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

iTunes for Windows doesn't do that? You can take the whole library or create specific playlists to show files you want. At least on the Mac version you can. You can bring the plain text file into Excel and get rid of the fields you don't want.

Even better you can create smart playlists so that you can export those lists (i.e. just the AAC files, just the songs played more that 10 times, etc).
posted by birdherder at 8:43 PM on April 4, 2004

iTunes also stores the entire music library as a (very large if you have a large collection) XML file. I don't know too much about XML, but I wager with the right processing it could be converted into any kind of report you want.
posted by neckro23 at 9:02 PM on April 4, 2004

This is what the output of Oidua looks like, it's what I use to make a list of my collection:

Album/Artist                                                                     | Files |   Size | Length | Type | Quality
===========================================================================================================================
Full Albums                                                                      |       |        |        |      |        
    Industrial - Downtempo                                                       |       |        |        |      |        
        Here - Brooklyn Bank (1999)                                              |    12 | 72.8Mb |  53:00 |  MP3 | 192 C  
        Larvae - Fashion Victim (2003)                                           |    10 | 62.9Mb |  45:46 |  MP3 | 192 C  
        Phylr - Contra la Puerta (1997)                                          |    11 | 69.5Mb |  49:11 |  MP3 | -aps   
    Industrial - Electro                                                         |       |        |        |      |        
        Cevin Key - The Dragon Experience (2003)                                 |    11 | 74.0Mb |  53:53 |  MP3 | 192 C  
        Dismantled - Dismantled (2002)                                           |    10 | 87.1Mb |  63:23 |  MP3 | 192 C  
        Dismantled - Dystopia (2002)                                             |     4 | 34.1Mb |  24:50 |  MP3 | 192 C  
        Front 242 - Front By Front (1988)                                        |    10 | 57.7Mb |  42:00 |  MP3 | 192 C  
        Front 242 - Pulse (Promo - 2003)                                         |    20 |  103Mb |  75:04 |  MP3 | 192 C  
        Front Line Assembly - Maniacal (2003)                                    |     3 | 31.7Mb |  23:02 |  MP3 | 192 C  
        Front Line Assembly - Tactical Neural Implant (1992)                     |     8 | 67.7Mb |  45:04 |  MP3 | -aps   
        Haujobb - Solutions For a Small Planet (1996)                            |    15 | 65.9Mb |  72:01 |  MP3 | 128 C  
        Monolith - Sub-System (Promo - 2003)                                     |    10 | 68.2Mb |  49:39 |  MP3 | 192 C  
        Velvet Acid Christ - Between The Eyes Vol.1 (2004)                       |    13 |  107Mb |  78:25 |  MP3 | 192 C  
        Velvet Acid Christ - Pretty Toy (Promo - 2003)                           |     4 | 31.0Mb |  22:33 |  MP3 | 192 C  
        Wumpscut - Bone Peeler (Ltd. Ed - 2004)                                  |    26 |  207Mb | 136:28 |  MP3 | -aps  

posted by Jairus at 10:59 PM on April 4, 2004

Yeah, iTunes for Windows does do this, because I exported the text file the other day just for giggles. It was fun to see that the export includes "play count" for each track, which I'm not aware that you can see within the actual app. So you can open the export file in Excel and sort to see your top 40 (or 4000, whatever) by frequency of play! Probably all kinds of other cool things to do with the .txt or the .xml, but I'm not aware.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 12:29 AM on April 5, 2004

Flanders: iTunes does have a visible play count column.
posted by teg at 12:49 AM on April 5, 2004

If you can't see the playcount, right click on the column header to selectively choose which columns to hide/display — there are some useful ones hidden in there.
posted by brool at 1:47 AM on April 5, 2004

I use the open source MPEG Audio Collection (MAC) to sort my digital audio. It supports mp3 and AAC, and the reports are fully cusomizable.
posted by kickerofelves at 7:42 AM on April 5, 2004