Shared Media Catalogs Over The Internet?

datawrangler asks: "For many years and for many reasons, I have postponed the task of creating a database of all my LPs, cassettes, CDs, and videotapes. Nearly twenty years ago, I made the effort to enter my comix collection into a database and all I have to show for it is a couple of 5.25" Apple ][ floppies which I can no longer read. Now that I live in a Web-enabled world, I am re-inspired to catalog all my media. It will take a good deal of time, but I will gladly invest it knowing that my collection is forever searchable via Internet. But how to proceed? I want to take a leaf from CDDB's book, and conform to their schema - or do I? Has anyone yet designed a useful standard for implementing a distributed database of recordings? How should I design my Web-enabled database so that it tells me not only that I own six recordings of 'How High The Moon' but also that there are 274 other known recordings of that tune?" A tall order, but something that might prove to be worthwhile. Thoughts?

Comments

Watch out for CDDB

[Anonymous Coward]

Their licensing is evil. In particular, they have all kinds of rules along the lines of "If you use our service, you must display our logo in your splash screen for X length of time at least Y pixels high" and so on. I don't know if they could extend that as far as the database schema per se, but I'd be hesitant to implement anything CDDB compatible because they don't seem to be playing fair ball. There is an effort underway to do a really free CDDB-like system, which was featured on Slashdot a year or two ago; that might be a good place to look.

this may help

[aint]

you may have already checked these out but hotscripts lists a few interesting audio(mp3) management utilities. see :

• for php ones
• for perl ones

none do exactly what you desire but being that most are opensource, they could ... ;) the cddb feature is of course the tricky part. you'll see that one of the perl scripts (RipIt) sort of does it but doesn't have a web-interface but idk, maybe it could.

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Alternatives for CDDB

[vrt3]

There are two alternatives that I know of: freedb, which is cddb compatible, and CD index, that is more feature-rich. Both are open source and promise to be open source forever.

How about UPC codes?

[Mark F. Komarinski]

Why not use UPC codes to categorize your meatspace media? It won't work that well with MP3 collections, but if you want to categorize comic books, vinyl, and CDs, this could be a good start.

You'd need a UPC scanner, which should be cheap enough. I think they plug into the kbd port, so no funky drivers necessary, works with a web interface. Then all you'd need is a database to keep track of the UPC codes and what they relate to. Once it's in once, you don't have to worry about it again. I think they store the manufacturer, so you'd get a lot of information out of it.

-Mark

For your CDs.....

[m0nkeyb0y]

Depending on just how much information you want to catalog about each CD, I recommend Discplay v4.0.4. When you insert a CD is will automagically connect to the CDDB and get the nfo on your selection. Once you have this done for every CD in your collection, you can export your collection to HTML which looks really nice and it ready to put right up on the web. It's available at hotfiles.com This does limit what information is shown. I just finished my own CD database this past weekend using a program called JFile on my Palm. I wanted custom fields like "total running time", "producer", etc. Next I have to do all my vinyl (no I'm not old, I'm a DJ), and videos!