mytreo.net Star Developer JFMw of Treoware adds to his collection of personal productivity tools AudioManager. While the application is meant to catalog your CD collection, I’ve had fun using it for that and a whole lot more.

The basic idea of the program is to catalog CDs. But there is much more to it than merely listing the title of each of your recordings. As shown in the screenshot, the initial screen has essential fields for “Artist” and “Title.” Further down there is a drop-down menu where you can choose between “Unclassified,” “Wish list,” “Purchased,” and “Borrowed.” The green arrow next to the date allows you to jump to the calendar and easily pick the date an album was added to your collection.

My favorite option is the lazy man’s method of adding a recording to the database. The second tab is the details screen. In this screen, you only need to enter the bar code from the CD’s package and click the internet button. What happens next is nothing short of magic!

In very little time, AudioManager queries a choice of online databases, and receives all the information necessary to fill in all important fields.

This query fills in the artist and album title on the first (general) screen, and when available, includes a thumbnail of the album cover.

Not only do you not have to type in the artist or album title, but most albums I queried also filled in the third (content) screen with the titles of all the tracks.

I was able to catalog all my CDs quickly and easily, with minimal typing on my part.

But less is not more…at least in my mind. While this application is intended for audio recordings, I decided to try entering bar codes for DVDs too.

As you can see from the screenshot, DVDs are as easy as CDs. Cover art is retrieved with a bar code search. Because this application is not made for mixed media, there is no way to sort out non-audio recordings. Downloaded movies data fills in fields such as “artist” and “title.” Some came up with the producer, some gave a secondary actor’s name for Artist.

Note that you can sort on any of the tags at the top of the screen (artist, title, release, status and price). Once you catalog your audio collection, you will never wonder about whether you have a particular title/artist again. It’s easy, and using the internet lookup makes it fun as well. The database is stored on your expansion card, so even if you have a large collection, you won’t run out of room.

Because it’s simple, it would be great to have one more filter so that you could catalog all your media. I like the idea of having my CDs and DVDs in one database. In the meanwhile, AudioManager is a very well written program that performs brilliantly.

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Filed under: Software reviews