Lateral thinking wins the day!
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Earlier in the week I posted a request for DB software for cataloging a largish classical CD collection, and received several useful replies. In the end I decided to roll my own in Access, and built the structure and relationships, and even got as far as loading 40 principal instruments, 100 genres and 900 composers. The base item of the DB was the 'work', a CD comprising of one or more works, and some works appearing on more than one CD. Great stuff - I was pleased with the flexibility of the design for what I wanted. Then I stopped to think. I estimated about 10,000 separate works in the collection. Even with everything for the 'work' being in drop-downs, just typing in the work title was going to be a very long pain in the asterisk, even before entering all the CD titles. Time for a rethink, and copious hot caffeinated liquids! I am an enthusiastic amateur photographer, with a good and fast Epson scanner, and Adobe Lightroom. Solution - scan the front and back of all the CD 'jewel boxes' - my scanning software lets me join two JPEGS - and keyword the hell out of them. I can then browse through the covers and works by using simple keywording for composer, genre, sub-genre, key instrument und so weiter. By having the scan of the CD cover I will be able to recognize the album straight away. The filename will be the location of the CD - drawer number, rank, and position in rank. My plan for using Lightroom fell apart as I have only a single licence, and the hi-fi laptop is not my main machine. A quick web search located an open-source project, 'digiKam', which is perfect because it supports hierarchical keywording. Yesterday I went out and bought a cheapo knock-up desk (or 'study table', as it grandly calls itself) and am about to put the thing together in the drawing room, and then stick the hi-fi laptop and scanner on it. In a trial run on my rather cluttered upstairs desk it took less than 15 seconds each to scan a batch of CDs front and back. Then it is just half a dozen clicks to register the keywords. The beauty of this system is that I can pretend to be doing useful work while actually sitting down and listening to my favourite music! :cool: