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How do I organize my music collection?

Introduction.

If you have hundreds of Audio CDs and thousands of audio files on your computer, it may become quite difficult to manage the whole music collection. Sometimes you may purchase a CD twice, simply because you couldn't find it and believed that you didn't really have it. Sometimes you may want to free some space by removing unnecessary duplicates, but would hate to do that manually.

Is it possible to get a clear view of your collection?

Let's take a look at Media Catalog Studio. This database-based application is designed to work with large collections of audio and video files, it can generate reports, sort files by any attribute or field (title, artist, year, size etc.). It also can find duplicates by ID3 information, by size, bitrate, and by other data.

Step 1: Download and install the program.

Download Media Catalog Studio to a known location. Run setup and follow on-screen instructions to install the application.

Step 2: Launch the program. Scan your disks.

Start Media Catalog Studio. At the first run, the program offers you to scan your disks for media. If for some reason the window doesn't show up (for example, if you have started the program before), simply click the leftmost button on the toolbar:

This will invoke the "Disks" window:

Scan for audio and video files

Check the media that you want to scan. By default, your hard drives (logical drives) are selected automatically.

On the right, check file types that should be added to the database. Most of multimedia formats are selected automatically, but you may want to ignore some of the supported formats. For example, if you want to catalog only your music collections, without videos, you may want to uncheck AVI, WMV, and other video formats.

WAV format is not checked by default. If you want to scan for them, check WAV in the list.

Click the "Scan disks for media" button on the right pane. Media Catalog Studio starts scanning your collection and adding information to its database. It reads ID3 tags and other details, so scanning may take some time with large collections. You can let the program run in the background.

Step 3: Manage your music collection.

Once your disks are scanned, all media files will be added to the database. Now you can search for specific entries in ID3 fields, play files directly from the application, find and remove duplicates, sort your collection by any attribute or field, generate reports, export data to Excel etc. You will be able to find a file even by a phrase from its lyrics (if the lyrics saved inside the file).

Manage your collection of music

Media Catalog Studio also features a built-in tag editor and CDDB support.