I have been researching a new database to catalogue my expanding physical musical collection. I seem to have a history of databases - here's the history. My research into a new database follows in Part 5.
I created my first music database around 1992 on my Commodore Amiga. It soon became redundant as Commodore Amiga's were replaced by PCs and, in any event, my CD collection was growing and I had no hard-drive on my Amiga.
It took a while but eventually I managed to transfer my data from my Commodore floppy disks on to my new PC (which cannot ordinarily read Commodore disks). I think I found a freeware Commodore program that made a Commodore disk drive able to write PC-readable data.
I then created a database in Access 97. This I customized quite a lot, but I still had a lot to learn and by then no time to learn it as I was in work. I decided to buy an off-the-shelf music database but they never had what I wanted. Namely: Store track names and separately song version (e.g. for remixes) and purchase information and a decent import function. Eventually I found the great CATraxx.
I trialled and used version 5 which I then registered for and later upgraded to version 6. It really is fantastic if you need to store lots of information and the import function is I reckon unique in being so customisable, as is the rest of the database generally.
Eventually, I moved to database number 4. Being iTunes. Now iTunes is not really a database of physical CDs, Vinyl, DVDs etc. But from my point of view, it overtook my database as I was more interested in adding CDs to iTunes, by ripping them, then by adding them to CATraxx by scanning the CD and getting informaiton from the online CD database (CDDB / Gracenote).
Now, instead of having a database of information, I had a database of songs that I could click and play. I started getting behind on keeping CATraxx up-to-date. My move to Mac at the end of 2005 exacerbated this. By age 30 I had managed to check that every CD was on CATraxx andon iTunes. But this has not been kept up.
So now I am faced with a large number of CDs that are on iTunes but not on CATraxx. And iTunes is missing information that is contained in CATraxx. And CATraxx is on the PC but I use Mac now for iTunes.
Time for Database number 5.
Number 1: Own Commodore Amiga written database in AMOS
Number 2: Own PC database written in Microsoft Access 97 (later Access 2000)
Number 3: CATraxx Version 5 & 6
Number 4: iTunes
Number 5: ? ? ? (see next post)
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