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Inventory of vinyl - what software do you use?

I am finally going to inventory my records this winter, or so I hope. I am wondering what software applications other Audiogoners use for this task. A specialized vinyl inventory program? MS Access or other database program? Also, what categories do you find most useful to keep a record of, besides Artist and Album name, condition of vinyl, record label, etc.?

I am not looking forward to this task but it is necessary, I think. I have been putting it on the back burner for way too long, out of pure laziness. I would like user-friendly software, with the ability to sort by field.

Please tell me what you use!

Holly
oakiris

Showing 1 response by rushton

rushton's avatar
rushton
2,445 posts
 
MS Access in use here. My collection is 80% classical and I wanted something I could set up as a relational database rather than a flat file given the multiple performances I wanted to track. If my collection were largely non-classical, then I would have used Excel and been very happy with the results. At this point, Access is tracking well over 4,000 LPs and over 13,000 individual works. For portability, I pull a report into Excel format to carry on my Palm.

The fields I use are:

- Composer
- Composer Dates
- Composer Period (Ancient, Baroque, Romantic, etc)

- Title of work
- Genre (orchestral, chamber, choral, etc)
- Type (Classical, Jazz, Blues, Rock, etc)
- Artists (conductor, orchestra, solists, etc. A single field for all since it can be easily searched and filtered.)

- Record Label
- Record Number
- Format (LP, CD, etc)
- Replacement Cost (for insurance purposes)
- Replacement Cost information source
- Filed Under (where the heck did I put that?)
- Comment (in which goes any information about pressing, recording engineer, etc.)

Since all of these fields can be searched and filtered, I can pull any subset of information I've been able to want or imagine.

And to Dan_ed's point about backup, I store both local and remote backup copies. The remote backups are stored on my accounts with my local ISP, my Yahoo email account and my Gmail email account. (Yes, overkill.)
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