Cataloging the collection

MopTopMike

MopTopMike

G45 Legend
Staff member
Joined
Apr 20, 2011
Location
The shores of southern CT
I'd like to inquire to all forum members:

For those of you who keep track of your record / CD, etc collection on computer, what type of database / cataloging system or program do you recommend?

I used to have the OYC (Organize Your Collection software program, but I never had time to get started with it. It is now of no use to me (can only run on older Windows OS).

I need to start logging my CD dubs made by myself and other collectors, to make it easy to find specific songs instantaneously. I spent 2 hrs trying to find a couple of songs to no avail.

Preferably, if there is something that can obtained for free via download etc, that would be most appreciated. It is something that is gonna take quite some time, but at least when I am gone from the planet, the next person will be able to use what I've done and be far more efficient than me!
 
I still use oyc everyday, you can run it on windows xp but not sure on windows 7 or higher, when I am forced to go to windows 8 my buddy rick is going to build me a new pc running both windows 8 and xp so I can still use my oyc.
 
I've had Microsoft Foxpro from the start around 1997 , but I found out it will be difficult to transfer to Apple if I want to. I was told it's possible, but I would have to convert it first and then transfer it. I do not think you can download it though.
 
I got an IBM PC in 1982. I got a copy of dBase II & started using that to catalog my collection. I switched to dBase III when it came out. I switched to the dBase clone Foxbase because it was faster in the late 80's. Eventually I switched to Foxpro after Microsoft bought it from Fox Software. I'm currently using Virtual FoxPro 6.0 which came out in 1998. Microsoft continued with new releases through VFP 9.0 in 2007. They have announced that 2015 is the last year that VFP 9.0 will be supported. But, VFP 6.0 still works and I expect it to work for a long time. Having your collection in a database makes it easy when someone asks a random question like what are your top 10 Texas garage 45s? I just sort on rating where state = "TX" and I have the answer in microseconds. Also I dump the database to a file on my phone, so I can check if I have a 45 or it's condition when I'm at a show.
 
mr. splendid said:
Whatever happened to that database you had one of your employees ( Aaron ? ) working on Mark ?
Click to expand...

Aaron (and our sales staff) wanted to update the company website, so he spent most of the second half of last year working on it. I couldn't really divert him from the job to work on my pet hobby. The company website nearly finished, most of the functions are hidden behind the trade login button which can't be viewed unless you are a customer. But you can still see the quality of Aaron's work here.

http://philtaylor.com.au
 
bosshoss said:
Aaron (and our sales staff) wanted to update the company website, so he spent most of the second half of last year working on it. I couldn't really divert him from the job to work on my pet hobby. The company website nearly finished, most of the functions are hidden behind the trade login button which can't be viewed unless you are a customer. But you can still see the quality of Aaron's work here. http://philtaylor.com.au
Click to expand...

I question your priorities, Mark. ;)
 
bosshoss said:
Aaron (and our sales staff) wanted to update the company website, so he spent most of the second half of last year working on it. I couldn't really divert him from the job to work on my pet hobby. The company website nearly finished, most of the functions are hidden behind the trade login button which can't be viewed unless you are a customer. But you can still see the quality of Aaron's work here.

http://philtaylor.com.au
Click to expand...

Very nice looking site. I did notice a minor typo in the paragraph about wrapping paper:

"Our gift wrapping paper range consists of traditional, contemporary and children's designs as we as fashionable and sophisticated prints." Should probably say "as well as"
 
mojogogo said:
Very nice looking site. I did notice a minor typo in the paragraph about wrapping paper:

"Our gift wrapping paper range consists of traditional, contemporary and children's designs as we as fashionable and sophisticated prints." Should probably say "as well as"
Click to expand...

Took me more than a month to notice your post mojo. Thanks, I'll get Aaron to change it.
 
MS access or openOffice Base are just fine. put everything in there & export/print/display just what you need. easy as pie.
 
Wife and I own a local record store and I've been working on a way to transition to the web. Been through pulling down the Discogs database for reference as well as converting the some 20k records that make up our point of sale into usable data. Problem is accurate descriptions and then I'm fighting against how best to set up browsing without having some huge predictive algorithm serving up suggestions.

Coming around and back to using Excel and parts of the Columbia/CBS late cataloging system. Here's a link to a great website where this idea came from: http://www.globaldogproductions.info/

Great website for it's simplicity but does little to accurately describe a used item.

While I really like rich content websites like Phil Taylor one above, I have a problem looking at this stuff across platforms (tablet, phone, vs actual PC). Both eBay as well as Amazon have cross platform sites but for a one man operation that's tough. THAT and building a somewhat maintainable content management system is daunting unless that's all you do.

Craig Moerer has something special in this realm: http://www.recordsbymail.com/index.php

This is what Discogs seems to aspire to and what Gemm or Musicstack has missed out on but where Amazon and eBay out preform.

If you are building any dataset, do it in the most simple and indexable way possible. Searchable (indexed) fields like label and artist should be unique and should come from one list per field. Then assign a free text description along with release number, version, condition, etc. Whatever numbering system you want as long as it's easily translated.

I regularly pull data and compile it like Popsike does so we can know what current values are and both Popsike and Discogs can be far from accurate. I thought that this was a regional issue and while we have regional issues here, there's still a prevailing phenomena in the data from both sites that leads me to believe values can often be inflated.

I think it'd be best to create something along the lines of a relative rarity scale, kind of like what Popsike has done but not culled from actual sales, something culled from user experience. The only way I think something like this could be done is to tap the collector community itself. Still a "rarity" scale would be outlandish to say the least.

This past December 2014, I put on eBay two copies of The Bad Roads "Blue Girl" Jin 210. One had a reserve of $800 and one had no reserve. The 45 with the reserve was bought by a guy in Australia for the reserve price. This was a NM- 45. The other copy was VG+ and sold for about $100 less. This proved to me, no matter the condition, a good playable rare record is really worth about the same across the board. Would the NM- record be worth more in an open auction, I really don't think so. All collectors want something perfect, but near perfect means all kind of different things to individuals,
 
I hadn't checked Craig Moerer's site for a few months. He has improved it greatly. Looks like a complete new program that is much better and faster than the old one. I can imagine the G45 database operating in a similar way, but with much more info, and many more fields and filters.
 
Moerer did that about a year ago, right? I still don't like his site and find it time consuming to look through his listings. I was doing it a couple years ago and found some good bargains here and there.
 
WOW! Okay, you guys turned me onto Teenbeat Mayhem which looks like a "must have". I will be ordering that tonight.

I've been so disappointed in the latest 45 catalogs from Goldmine. Tim Neely was the best at these in the states and I don't see him doing anything lately. Like it's been almost 10 years since his last discography was released and so much has changed. Even then, Goldmine catalogs told you nothing about the music itself and you could only gauge scarcity by how much value was placed on the title. I can imagine how daunting assigning genre's to a discography would become.

Right now we have over 20,000 items cataloged in our point of sale system and all were hand typed so we try to at least capture the genre. Seems like many including Craig Moerer are using a dataset that was culled from various online sources and you can't get good descriptors this way. Consider "musicbrainz", which touts itself as the "The Open Music Encyclopedia", I find most descriptions woefully inadequate so why bother to use them. Yet, Craig Moerer at least has his catalog indexed so a specific title can be found using a search engine such as Google. Discogs barely achieves this and Gemm and Music Stack obviously aren't trying to optimize their catalog listings for searching.

To digress; I have problems listing records on eBay MOSTLY because I can't get the genre correct. Sometimes it's worth the effort to get it right and other times it's not. Here in the US, the rising sentiment is to buy new now that copies of records such as Fleetwood Mac's "Rumors" are being reissued. Most people, I'd say at least half of our customers in the past 12 months, are buying new records exclusively, so there's little incentive to help them find extraordinary but overlooked used records. In fact, I do not think we would be able to keep the lights on if we were selling exclusively to a collectors market despite what Record Store Day would have people believe.

Lately on eBay, I've noted that everyone is an expert on "Northern Soul" or "Garage". And sometimes I just go with the consensus even if I personally would not call a record "Northern Soul" or "Garage". I kind of have to because it means nothing to a potential buyer to describe a record that "I like" unless I can tell them why I like it and what records could be thought of as similar. I'm thankful to the many Brits and Aussies that have offered me listing advice, because NO ONE in the US does that. This is an important part of the true record store experience if you ask me. Good record stores know when to offer advice and also when to not offer advice and so many retailers have no idea what actually makes a good record store.

What can I say other than we in the US are behind the curve compared to the informed British collector. Maybe because vinyl never really "died out" in the UK. I don't know. We offer nothing close to the city of London's "Music Informatics Research Group" here in the US, yet we are driving the digital revolution.

Finally, I encourage everyone to visit The International Society for Music Information Retrieval's website at: http://www.ismir.net/index.html and please further investigate their "Datasets" links here: http://www.ismir.net/resources.html#datasets as this consortium has some of the best information for cataloging music I have seen.
 
cotintail said:
Finally, I encourage everyone to visit The International Society for Music Information Retrieval's website at: http://www.ismir.net/index.html and please further investigate their "Datasets" links here: http://www.ismir.net/resources.html#datasets as this consortium has some of the best information for cataloging music I have seen.
Click to expand...

At last, a consortium that actively addresses a sorely neglected aspect of our musical data processing obsessions - "WiMIR"

"Women In Music Information Retrieval"
 
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