I think if I were starting again with a collection  I should follow the advice given many years ago by David Hall in 'The Record Book'. Number each disc with a little sticker, shelve them in number order,then enter the details in a loose-leaf book in any alphabetical order you choose,artist,composer,or cross-referenced, writing the disc number against each item . It is simple and fail-safe.

Whe I retired I decided to catalogue my CDs, partly to make some use of the Computer I bought some years ago for the boys, and the Microsoft Access I got when my other half was ona computer course, and after a failed attempt last year when I tried tommake the database too elaborate,I succeeded this year in getting the lot onto computer before my memory starts to fail and I can't remember what I've got.

Andy,

I too have used Access for the database of classical music, CDs and LPs, and still maintain an index card for LPs. Yes, several hours of work when I first began typing it up but it's very useful e.g. yesterday when asked how many recordings of a work..... I quickly found Beethoven's 5th was the top one for me 

Each work gets a line in the database, so for a CD of two concertos each concerto gets a line. My database has over 3600 lines (includes lots of songs, arias on CD/LP compilations) , but like the Beethoven 5th there are many repeats of works, not sure how many DIFFERENT works I have, maybe just 2000, no real idea to be honest.

The data in the table includes work, composer, columns for performers/soloist/singers, orchestra, conductor, label, cat. no., year recorded, and a few notes. So a quick column sort reveals I have 11 works performed by Rostropovich, 19 by Richter, remembering his name may appear in more than one column.

This is all very nerdy, I'll stop 

Oh I haven't mentioned jazz 78's, ok I wont.


John W

OK, soz increpatio, I was responding to the thread rather than your initial posting, but, to answer that, I don't have an mp3 player or an iPod, because I don't find myself in a place where I would use them, and anyway the sound quality is inferior.

I don't see what your problem is. If I DID use one of those appliances then I'd probably select and load a fresh playlist every month, say, and go with that. I wouldn't fill the thing to bursting if I wasn't going to listen to it all during the next month.


John W

You can! (under Mac OS X anyway).

I know the problem with the full iPod. My solution is to have an external hard disc for overflow storage.

I mean, using the three column-thing at the top, and not scrolling through them all manually(i know you can have a composer colume, and it's not the worst thing in the world to use, but still)?


Yeah; I'm going to have to do this as soon as I can; have my hard-disk filled up; just waiting for a cheap drive to pop up somewhere so I can pounce on it.

Have to say this is my major iTunes gripe.  I would happily switch to some other media player if it worked and let me browse by composer in some sensible way.  Grrrrr.

My problem with iTunes is that you have in the background, with all the metadata, a potentially quite powerful database, and then they give you a rubbishy old front end that only uses about a 10th of the potential. Now, if the browse was customisable to include as many or as few fields as you wanted, maybe a couple of user-defined queries - then you might have something.

As for increpatio's problem, I'm not quite at a one-in-one-out stage with my mp3 player, but I'm getting closer. My solution so far has been to burn onto CD all those things that I like owning, but don't honestly listen to all that often (as well as some things that don't lend themselves to listening on the move). Moving The Well-Tuned Piano and Feldman's String Quartet 2 onto CD freed up some space pretty quickly, for example!