database program for music collection, finally

Herman,

Thanks for the heads up on collecorz. I downloaded the trial version for it also. The ability to customize reports looks promising. I have been able to find some vinyl but it seems you have search artist & title. Maybe this weekend I will have time to figure out which program is best for me.

Thanks, Bryan

I'm going with kix since I have about 4,000 pieces to enter. The others have better interfaces and more features, but the ability enter the entire inventory of each artist at one time will save me hours and hours of work. The kix presents a list of everything it found and you can pick what you have.

With over 1000 CDs I'm not willing to put each one into the computer for it to search CDDB. You get more info but it is very slow compared to picking from a list and I'm really just interested in a list of what I have so I can quit buying duplicates.

The kix program also pulls up a lot of old vinyl that the others miss so that will save a lot of time.

Herman,
I have over 10K classical LPs and have long wondered how to inventory them, with lots of detail, as efficiently and inexpensively as possible. It sounds like you're done a lot of research on the subject and I assume that you've spent a lot of time inventorying your own collection. What is your opinion today about the best way to go? Is it still Kix? Of Collectorz? Thanks for the time
Jeff

Funny you should ask. After almost 7 years I never took it any further and my collection remains un-inventoried. Then, a few weeks ago I was shopping for home insurance and the agent suggested I do so. I once again downloaded the trial of Kix and have been playing with it.

It still looks to me like Kix is the way to go for vinyl. It looks through several internet databases and finds quite a few titles. I'm not so sure about classical though as most of my collection is jazz and rock.

Before I take the plunge I'm waiting on word from the underwriters what they will accept as proof of value. No point in doing the inventory for me unless it will serve as proof of value and I'm think I may need an appraisal. I'm also considering just taking a picture of each album and storing that.

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I'm cataloging my vinyl collection of some 3500+ jazz and classical albums. First of all, any software that only allows one artist per album is conceptually broken and unusable, IMHO.

The only thing I found that does it right (but not entirely) is CollectorZ. It's buggy and the UI is absolutely hideous (the Mac version is a very bad port of a Windows UI). It gets others things wrong, and the list management is very flakey, but it's still the best I have found. I does have some very nice reporting and listing features. In the end it is the best I have found. So far I have cataloged some 360+ jazz records. It finds most of them via Discogs and CollectorZ, but almost always requires further editing. The classical stuff will be more problematic. I have 2000 classical LPs and most are imports, many somewhat obscure.