It may seem like a timely process, but software can quickly hasten the process and if you’re willing to pay $10-$20, you can buy hardware which will further minimise the needed time.

You must initially decide how you will input your possessions into whatever software you choose to own. Naturally, you can input the product’s details but this can be timely. Other options are to buy an inexpensive barcode scanner or some software even allows you to utilise your webcam as a barcode scanner.

With regards to software, there are options for every platform.

The de facto official cataloguing software for OS X has to be Delicious Library. Delicious Library allows you to search Amazon for items, through keywords, barcodes, titles, authors, directors etc., and then import the data, including the current price used versions sell there, straight into the software. Items can then be displayed in a number of ways, including an aesthetically appealing ’shelf’ mode which shows the picture of each item on a shelf and is at the item’s size. One can also rate items inside the software. Supported input modes are typing, scanning barcodes with the iSight camera (to varied degrees of success) or using their Bluetooth barcode scanner (which costs over $100!). It also allows libraries to be shared over a local network. It costs $40.

MediaMan is similar software for Windows. It too grabs data off Amazon, displays it in a ’shelf’-like view. It supports USB barcode scanners and webcams too. It works on XP and Vista, and also costs $40! Basically, it’s like Delicious Library for Windows!

GCStar is free and open-source cataloguing software, for Linux, BSD, OS X and Windows. The software can grab data from a host of sources.

I use a CueCat Barcode Scanner, which when modified works with all of the above software. It simply converts barcodes into keystrokes. You can pick one of these up for around €10, but ensure it’s modified or it won’t work.

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Helium Music Manager

Are you the sort of person who likes to keep every piece of mp3 meta data correct? You have album art for every song in your music library and spend hours keeping your favourite artists’ Wikipedia entry up-to-the-minute?

Well it’s a shame then that many music jukebox applications don’t provide the functionality for people like you. If you’ve ever wanted to be able to browse your library by genre, sub genre, sub-sub-sub genre, music label and city of origin then I have found something in which you can do it.

Helium Music Manager provides a way to actually use every piece of data you have on an artist. You can have biographies, lyrics for every song, associated artists, see which bands individual musicians have been in and much more. Everything is analysed and collected into graphs and statistics, so you can see how much of your library was produced by EMI during the year 1970 if you so wished.

The biggest problem with Helium is just that it takes a lot of time to get your collection organized… there is no ‘batch tag’ option and for every artist you will need to go through and individually download and save data, lyrics, details, biography, reviews etc. However if you don’t mind that, or purchasing it, then I would defiantly recommend this as a music organiser alternative.

Conclusion, if you’re obsessed with your music this will let your organise it totally, however it’s not the most intuitive application at all and may cause some frustration for a lot of users.

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With more than 2000 books and hundreds of CDs and DVDs it would just be a pretty boring process and I don’t want to waste that much time. Libra could be a solution for me. It is a free software that organizes collections offering several features that make it stick out of the masses.

The first is a unique one that I never heard about before. It can use a webcam to scan a barcode and identify the item by itself. No more typing and searching through the results to find the item that you bought. This is really useful.

Libra supports other search options besides keyword searches, those are: UPC, ISBN, EAN and Jan in case the barcode reader can’t be used or the item does not have a barcode which is the case for many of my books that I own.

Libra currently searches six Amazon databases which should be fine for most Books, Games, CDs and DVDs but could pose problems for older items. The search itself is very fast and displays covers as well as information about the item. All items are shown as if they were lying on a bookshelf which is also how they are shown in your collection.

Several other features include a way to keep track of borrowed items, print options, create web pages with your collection, import possibilities for existing collections and xml support.

External Links:

Libra Homepage

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Now i don’t know how many readers work with websites, but maybe some of you can use this link. It’s an article on how to speed up sites using .htaccess file. It is quite a read but it looks promising, and the comment discussion there can also prove to be quite useful.

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Ipodlibrary is able to import txt, doc, lit and html documents avoiding the 1000 notes limit of the iPod (by setting some to inactive which means that they do not count against the limit). It keeps track of the position that you are currently at which makes it easy to continue where you left of.

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