Catalog books, music and movies with free catalogue software
Posted on December 24, 2008 at 5:34 am
Earlier I wrote about a program called Visual CD, a free way to catalog your media files from CD, DVD, and other removable media. It’s great for cataloging all of your files that you burn off to CD or DVD, such as movies, MP3s, etc, but it lacks a few useful features.
One of the main issues with Visual CD is that it does not connect to any external service automatically to grab extra information about files, other than MP3 music files. If you have a lot of movies, etc, it will only store the name, but will not download information like the genre, director, and so on.
Data Crow is another cataloging software that is completely open-source and has some nice features. Firstly, you can use it to catalog not only your digital content, but also your physical collection of books, music, and movies. Unlike Visual CD, you can use Data Crow to catalog books in your library, music on your computer or audio CDs, and movies on your hard drive or DVD discs.
You can even catalog all of your software using Data Crow. However, the feature that I like most is the fact that it connects to many different external services to retrieve detailed information about the book, software, MP3, or movie.
It supports Amazon.com, IMBD.com, and FreeDB.com, which probably have enough information on any book, music file, software title, or movie that you might have. As you can see from the above image, it will download extra information about movies, such as the genre, description, and even the movie poster image.
If you have a software program like Photoshop, just type in the name and Data Crow will pull the rest of the information from Amazon. For music, it will automatically find artist, album name, album art, track name and more.
For movie cataloging, it supports many file formats including DivX, Xvid, ASF, MKV, OGM, RIFF, MOV, IFO, VOB and Mpeg video. So no matter which format you have your movies stored, it will be able to catalog them.
The latest version of the program also supports cataloging images. It can read all of the meta data stored inside the pictures, such as date taken, height, width, compression, camera model, etc.
The program has other cool features that make it better than Visual CD in my opinion including:
- Customizable GUI interface – change fonts, skins, views to how you like it
- Create your own modules besides the defaults (software, music, movies, books, images)
- Has a built-in loan management system in case you loan your stuff out to other people a lot (cool!)
- Includes a powerful image editor to manipulate images inside the program
- Create PDF and HTML reports of all of your digital or non-digital collections
- Easily create a backup of your data and easily restore it on another computer using Backup and Restore feature
Overall, it’s a great way to catalog your books, music, movies, software or anything else that you happen to collect! Since it’s customizable, you can add modules to catalog your collection of comic books, coins, or anything else! Enjoy!
» Filed Under Software Reviews
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