Your music cataloging "system"

[Peter Friedman]

What I have noticed from looking at some example given above, my 3X5 card catalog system may have more complete information. All my 3x5 cards, with just a few limited exceptions, list the musicians on the CD with an abbreviation of the instruments they are each playing.

One thing in hindsight that I wish I had included was the recording date or dates of the session.

[hopkins]

49 minutes ago, Peter Friedman said:

What I have noticed from looking at some example given above, my 3X5 card catalog system may have more complete information. All my 3x5 cards, with just a few limited exceptions, list the musicians on the CD with an abbreviation of the instruments they are each playing.

One thing in hindsight that I wish I had included was the recording date or dates of the session.

I include all that information. The session dates are useful to get a sense of the chronology, of course, but also sometimes to find information more easily when looking at discographies (websites, books...). 

 

[Д.Д.]

1 hour ago, Brad said:

Sorry, but it is true. I tried to import the new Grateful Dead set that just came out and all the discs are separate entries. Same for a BB King box set. It’s not the worst thing in the world, just pointing out one of the idiosyncrasies. 

When you want to input a box set in Collectorz and the "Add Albums" search returns multiple individual discs you can click-select all the relevant ones and then click on "add as multi-disc album".

There might be some hick-ups with just-released (or very obscure) items that might be not (yet) present in the Collectorz Core database.  

In general, from my experience, Collectorz can definitely beat Excel (which I know very well - and love) in terms of speed of music data entry.  

Edited March 30, 2020 by Д.Д.

[Bluesnik]

On 26/03/2020 at 5:37 PM, JSngry said:

But if you're the type of person who enjoys cracking something open as much if not more than doing something with it afterwards, hey, GAME ON!!!!

My father's exactly like that , something I've never really understood. As a kid he loved opening and rebuilding radios. Later in his 20s and 30s he was very much into photography. And he finally became an engineer.

Edited March 30, 2020 by Bluesnik

[Ken Dryden]

The nice thing about Discogs is it can help find duplicates in a collection that you may be unaware of at all, especially with the retitling of reissues and changing the leader's name at times. That's only true if all of the related releases have been grouped under one master release and there are still plenty of newbies who either are unaware that they need to do it or don't know how to do it.

 

[jcam_44]

3 hours ago, Д.Д. said:

When you want to input a box set in Collectorz and the "Add Albums" search returns multiple individual discs you can click-select all the relevant ones and then click on "add as multi-disc album".

There might be some hick-ups with just-released (or very obscure) items that might be not (yet) present in the Collectorz Core database.  

In general, from my experience, Collectorz can definitely beat Excel (which I know very well - and love) in terms of speed of music data entry.  

This is how I do it as well, Brad may want something that requires no input at all. I don’t know but to tell me you can’t do something that I’ve clearly done for a decade means he has determined he is right in his mind and I’m okay with that. I don’t care I’m anyone else ever uses Collectorz, but I’m glad to have it. 

[JSngry]

The 3x5 cards was something I did when borrowing LPs to copy onto cassette, only I bought them in spiral-ed togetr forms, like a spiral notebook only for index cards. I wrote down EVERYTHING about the record and personnel, even, every once in a while, portions of the liner notes that had historical data. I still have those, as well as the cassettes, and for the tapes I've yet to replace with real copies, it's still a useful research.

[Brad]

1 hour ago, jcam_44 said:

This is how I do it as well, Brad may want something that requires no input at all. I don’t know but to tell me you can’t do something that I’ve clearly done for a decade means he has determined he is right in his mind and I’m okay with that. I don’t care I’m anyone else ever uses Collectorz, but I’m glad to have it. 

 No, I’m telling you that when I went to input the box set that’s how it came out for me. Now, I’m glad That A.A. pointed out there’s another way you can do it but when I use Discogs I don’t have this issue, and for the reasons I stated above, I didn’t find Collectorz, for me, to be superior to Discogs. You like Collectorz, hey, that’s great.  They each appear to be good cataloguing systems, each with their pluses and minuses. 

[jcam_44]

Agreed.

 

In case anyone is curious what a box set looks like in collectorz. 

 

https://imgur.com/lElH5S0

https://imgur.com/WBleNAc

[jazzcorner]

 

On 30.3.2020 at 1:22 PM, jazzcorner said:

Here is a random page from my very fast Paradox DB  you can print out various reports. This is the standard report with the main & important data for each Item in the collection. The head of this report is wrong however and has to be changed to "various".  System saves always the last report. Arch # runs from 0001 to 9999 / bigbands have an additional "3" and can be sorted accordingly.

For track titles I have a separate file "titles" which contains all the data above so you can sort according the titles or acc. the LP titles also. Pl. see the second tableau (page one)

Here is the tableau one for the Items (CD / LP)

Looks like my scans have Covid-19 and are vanished

 

Quote

This is the second tableau for  "Titles"

 

Looks like my scans have Covid-19 and are vanished

Edited March 31, 2020 by jazzcorner
text added

[Д.Д.]

12 hours ago, Brad said:

 No, I’m telling you that when I went to input the box set that’s how it came out for me. Now, I’m glad That A.A. pointed out there’s another way you can do it but when I use Discogs I don’t have this issue, and for the reasons I stated above, I didn’t find Collectorz, for me, to be superior to Discogs. You like Collectorz, hey, that’s great.  They each appear to be good cataloguing systems, each with their pluses and minuses. 

I am actually using both, Collectorz and Discogs. My Collectorz database is a primary one and the Discogs one I add to sort of casually. I often manually add a link from my Collectorz album entry to a Discogs one. 

12 hours ago, jcam_44 said:

Agreed.

In case anyone is curious what a box set looks like in collectorz. 

https://imgur.com/lElH5S0

https://imgur.com/WBleNAc

There is also a dedicated box set input and display format but I never used it.

It's interesting to see the Collector view templates other people use. I use a Flex Dark (with a background).

[Brad]

I did like the background that Collectorz had. Is there a way to import the data from your Collection on Discogs into Collectorz?

[Д.Д.]

1 hour ago, Brad said:

I did like the background that Collectorz had. Is there a way to import the data from your Collection on Discogs into Collectorz?

Yes you can. You can import your Discogs collection to your Collectorz Cloud (which is gradually becoming better but still pretty much sucks, IMHO) and then sync it with your desktop version.

https://www.collectorz.com/music/music-connect/whatsnew/2018/03/27/new-import-your-collection-from-discogs

And you can import a CSV file with your Discogs collection to Collectorz desktop software. 

Edited March 31, 2020 by Д.Д.

[Brad]

Thanks. May give it another look. 

[jazzcorner]

17 hours ago, Ken Dryden said:

The nice thing about Discogs is it can help find duplicates in a collection that you may be unaware of at all, especially with the retitling of reissues and changing the leader's name at times. That's only true if all of the related releases have been grouped under one master release and there are still plenty of newbies who either are unaware that they need to do it or don't know how to do it.

Yep but look at this one = different title and different label but same content

[r8576870] Discogs #

[r8576080] Discogs #

Edited March 31, 2020 by jazzcorner
more text

[JSngry]

4 hours ago, jazzcorner said:

Looks like my scans have Covid-19 and are vanished

Were you linking them from a URL or as an attachment from the board server?

[Д.Д.]

1 hour ago, jazzcorner said:

Yep but look at this one = different title and different label but same content

[r8576870] Discogs #

[r8576080] Discogs #

Is this what you wanted to post? 

https://www.discogs.com/Roberta-Gambarini-Lush-Life/release/8576870

https://www.discogs.com/Roberta-Gambarini-Hank-Jones-You-Are-There/release/8576080

[jazzcorner]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Were you linking them from a URL or as an attachment from the board server?

It were my own scans (.jpg files) inmserted as images from an URL

Here is  one of the samples again and I hope it arrives at your screen.

It shows the collection in form of a"report" with the important data and sorted aplhabetically and re   rec. date.

For track titles I have a separate data file in cluding the  data below so I can sort the track titles alphabetically and

per record number. Works fine for me. Name of the DB = PARADOX ( former Borland product).

Thank for the reply.

W.

1 hour ago, Д.Д. said:

Is this what you wanted to post? 

https://www.discogs.com/Roberta-Gambarini-Lush-Life/release/8576870

https://www.discogs.com/Roberta-Gambarini-Hank-Jones-You-Are-There/release/8576080

Yes thats correct.

 

Edited March 31, 2020 by jazzcorner
typos

[JSngry]

I see your image now.

[jcam_44]

Any new recommendations on this front. I’m pretty much tired of trying to get Collectorz to do the basing things anymore. I just want to input on my computer and transfer it to the mobile app. It used to work easily but now it appears they want you to upload to their cloud for some reason and their cloud is awful. 

[John L]

11 minutes ago, jcam_44 said:

Any new recommendations on this front. I’m pretty much tired of trying to get Collectorz to do the basing things anymore. I just want to input on my computer and transfer it to the mobile app. It used to work easily but now it appears they want you to upload to their cloud for some reason and their cloud is awful. 

Yea, I am really pissed about that.  I bought Music Collector for my Mac and invested a bit of time into it.  Now they are saying that they will no longer update it.  So when Apple changes its operating system, it will probably vanish.   The online thing does not look great and there does not appear to be an easy way to transfer a lot of the info from my database there.   This is deja vu.  I had Cattrax and lost that when the company vanished.   

[Ken Dryden]

If you upload your collection to Discogs, you can request a download of your collection files from time to time. I've invested a lot of time so I need to do that in case something happens to the company.

It is time consuming, particularly when so many releases don't have listings that match what I own, though I sometimes let it slide on marked promos. I have no idea how close I am to uploading everything.

[jcam_44]

36 minutes ago, John L said:

Yea, I am really pissed about that.  I bought Music Collector for my Mac and invested a bit of time into it.  Now they are saying that they will no longer update it.  So when Apple changes its operating system, it will probably vanish.   The online thing does not look great and there does not appear to be an easy way to transfer a lot of the info from my database there.   This is deja vu.  I had Cattrax and lost that when the company vanished.   

I’ve got over a decade investing in my collectorz. I knew I should have bailed when they started referring to it as the old transfer option. It had become spotty for a couple years and now just doesn’t work. It’s a real shame because it was such a good product before they wanted to find ways to milk people endlessly. 

[John L]

I just visited the Collectorz online service.  Wow, does it suck!    It is just a list of of albums and songs by artist like iTunes.   All of the useful information from my database - musicians on albums, listening notes, etc. - vanished when I supposedly transferred by database there.   Now I am stuck in a dilemma and stand to lose what I have built.  

[Dmitry]

I've been using CATraxx for about 20 years. It's an amazing program by a Norwegian programmer Fredrik Nordbakke. He is no longer active, but it may still be available. https://www.fnprg.com/ I tried toying with the Collectorz, but wasn't impressed. The only upside to it, is that it's available as a phone app.