I want to track my record collection without using Discogs. How?

June 2, 2019 9:07 AM

I've been dutifully recording every bit and bob of my record collection in Discogs over the past few years, and it's a pretty sweet site. There's just two problems with it, and long-term, I think I may need to find something to augment or replace Discogs.

The first problem is that I'm one of those weirdos that organizes their record collection not alphabetically or by genre, but by acquisition date. When I look back at my CD collection, it becomes a sort of autobiography: oh, there's the album that got me through that one summer in high school, or that album made it onto one of my university mixtapes, or whatever. Discogs doesn't support this at all, and the hackish workaround I've had to implement is two additional columns where I manually enumerate a) the date of acquisition, to the detail I remember it, and b) a manually incremented index to maintain ordering. This is an absolutely terrible system and I hate it except there is no other option. Hilariously, you can't even VIEW the proper ordering in Discogs; I have to use another tool, ogger.club, to order by a custom field (or the Android Discogs app).

That's not a dealbreaker. The dealbreaker is this: increasingly I find that Discogs just doesn't have the music release I want to add. Lately I've been listening to a lot more Japanese music. Discogs doesn't have a ton of depth to its Japanese catalog, I assume partially because it's a very Anglocentric site, but also because Japanese music is still predominantly released in CD format and Discogs skews heavily towards vinyl. Because of the aforementioned manual incrementing to keep my collection in order, I only add new releases to my collection if there's already a Discogs entry, because it's the only manageable way to know what index to apply. I can just look at the last CD I bought and say "oh, that's #123, so the next one must be #124."

The last time I updated my collection was in January. I've bought a bunch of music since then that I cannot add to my collection until I myself add it to Discogs. Have you ever tried to manually add a Japanese release to Discogs? It's terrible. You need the full tracklist, which means an enjoyable 10-20 minutes of manually copying and pasting an Amazon.co.jp listing (if you're lucky!) into Discogs because of course you don't have a Japanese keyboard and wouldn't know how to use it even if you did. (Very occasionally I buy video game soundtracks from Japan. I have legitimately scaled back on these purchases because the thought of manually copying and pasting ONE HUNDRED track titles in kanji/hiragana/katakana chills my blood.) Plus you need to scan in a cover image. It's a lot of work for each release, and so of course I don't do it. But then that means I don't update my collection, which means it gradually loses its value as a recording tool.

So. I'm looking for something that can at least grab information from Discogs if it exists, but doesn't force me to add releases to Discogs if it doesn't. I'd also like to be able to order by acquisition date. And I'd like it to be at least as user-friendly as Discogs.

I'll just assume that no one is ever going to answer this question, but I figured I might as well ask in case there's something really obvious I'm missing. Thanks!

posted by chrominance to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

You mention obvious solutions might be in scope, and your comment history suggests you have db/webdev experience, so I wonder if you've considered a Google spreadsheet with a custom function to retrieve essential fields from Discogs using UrlFetchApp.fetch(query).getContentText() and a little bit of parsing / cell manipulation. Your manual data entry when a Discogs page exists would be limited to acquisition date and Discogs URL. When there's no Discogs page, you could manually enter the minimum you care about and link to Amazon.co.jp for the rest.
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:37 AM on June 2, 2019

Response by poster: I have indeed thought about whether a Google Sheet is the best tool for this bizarre job! I'm still looking for something more ready-made but this may end up being my backup solution, especially if I can find some nicer solutions to grabbing the data I need from the Discogs API.

I have built semi-legit personal webapps for similar reasons before, but knowing my previous history it'll be a pain to keep it updated as frameworks and technology move forward.
posted by chrominance at 1:16 PM on June 2, 2019

If these are CD releases, would they be on MusicBrainz? Looks like there's an script to go from Amazon → MB and then possibly on to discogs. MB isn't friendly at all, but as an intermediate database it's not too bad.

There is a Windows music database program ($$) that a friend uses that allows you to order your collection by any field, including custom ones such as acquisition date. As my friend orders their music by colour, yours should be no problem. Now, if only I could remember its name …
posted by scruss at 2:02 PM on June 2, 2019

I think rolling your own is probably the best way to a satisfactory solution. Instead of Google Sheets, though, I would use Google Datastore. It's a row-oriented, schemaless, NoSQL database which you access using a query language called GQL. Much easier to use than BigTable, from what I understand, and I think it would be perfect for backing something that's fundamentally a CRUD-type application like this. I'd do the Discogs (and maybe MusicBrainz) API hits from the client layer and just have the DB be a backing store of your collection.

Obviously you could probably use a SQL database too, but personally I don't think the overhead of running a SQL instance is worth it unless you are really into self-hosting and only care about accessing the app from within your local network (the security implications of exposing it to the public Internet being pretty iffy).
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:20 PM on June 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

You didn't mention what operating system you use. If you are a macOS person, there's an app called Delicious Library that might do what you want. It's meant to catalog media collections and can even pull information via barcode if you have a scanner.

I used to use v2 (they're on v3 now, and have been for a while) and the barcode matching was pretty good, but I'm not sure how well it will fare with non-English releases. It seems to scrape Amazon as a source, so if you can find it via Amazon I like your odds.

If you're not on macOS or just don't want to pay for a solution, there's a few open source alternatives like Data Crow or Tellico. Note that Data Crow seems to have builds for Windows, Tellico not so much.
posted by jzb at 6:23 PM on June 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

There is a Windows music database program ($$) that a friend uses that allows you to order your collection by any field, including custom ones such as acquisition date. As my friend orders their music by colour, yours should be no problem. Now, if only I could remember its name …

You may be thinking of CATraxx, which is what I've been using for years specifically because it offered tons of extensibility. (I also keep track of acquisition source and date, which makes it easy to browse stuff I've recently acquired even after it's buried in the stacks.) Sadly the whole CAT family of collection management software is no longer available for sale, so I'm going to be watching this thread for ideas - eventually it's going to lose its integration with Discogs and I'm going to be forced to move on.
posted by Banky_Edwards at 8:29 AM on June 3, 2019 [1 favorite]

But then that means I don't update my collection, which means it gradually loses its value as a recording tool.

Which is the way community-built sites work. I've contributed 169 releases, which is about 10 per year, and I've contributed (add detail, images, etc.) many more, and sure with a bunch of drafts hanging around that would be (or were at the time I abandoned them) annoying to complete.

I get it, it's a big old thing (pray you don't get into adding by matrix numbers), I have things set up for it (markers on a scanner) and I haven't added anything in a few years, but just like I don't complain if an article doesn't exist on Wikipedia yet, I either start in on a stub draft (and you don't have to include EVERYTHING there's a field for) and just get it in there. Cat#, artist/title/tracknames, and date, is just about the minimum submission, after which other people will find it and add to it. This much is predictable.

There are a few popular media collection manager apps out there, but I'm not at the computer where I have those bookmarks. I'll try to circle back once I am back there.
posted by rhizome at 11:07 AM on June 3, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Which is the way community-built sites work. I've contributed 169 releases, which is about 10 per year, and I've contributed (add detail, images, etc.) many more, and sure with a bunch of drafts hanging around that would be (or were at the time I abandoned them) annoying to complete.

127 releases here, all in the last year or so. I'm definitely no stranger to creating Discogs releases. Honestly, if I could add draft items to my collection and tack on custom fields, that would basically solve my problem; I don't mind creating drafts and going back to fill them in later. Alas.
posted by chrominance at 2:51 PM on June 3, 2019