Music & DVD's

Wow, we have a lot of CD's and DVD's. Well, maybe... maybe not... I guess it depends on your view of "a lot".

I have this catalog program - AVCataloger - that manages my DVD/Movie, CD, Book, Software titles. It also has a spot for Loaned Out materials and a Wish List.

So, I entered all of our DVD's over the Christmas break into it - including what I could get my hands on from The Boy's room, we have .... wait for it.... drum roll.... 118 DVD's. They really don't take that much room in the living room - just 3 somewhat overstuffed shelves, so I would never think of them as 118 individual DVDs living in my house.

As any self respecting geek would, we are going through our cd collection to add to our i-Tunes. I pretty much had this done when I got my iPod (long, long ago)... but Hubby did not get around to it. It has been on his TO DO list for a while (aka since Christmas '06). In all fairness, he did start it... but got distracted/bored/busy with school/busy with work/busy with travel, etc. So, he is finally getting around to going through all of them now. So I add each CD to the Cataloger after he has scanned it for his iPod pleasure. Right now, we are at 165 CD's. He is almost done... maybe another 40 or 50 CD's to go. This number does NOT include most of The Boy's CD's. I think he doesn't want me to get my hands on whatever CD's he has, plus, now with iTunes, he mostly buys stuff online.

I originally bought this software because I was going to make a list of everything in my house for insurance purposes. When we moved into our log home, it amazed me how much STUFF we actually had. I had read somewhere that you should take a video of each room in your house, describing what was in it, how old/new it was, what it was worth, whether it was a family heirloom, and so on. I thought to myself that a quick glance of DVD's and CD's wouldn't cut it with an insurance company, so I looked for some software that was able to inventory stuff easily and quickly. I admit I could have just whipped out my trusty Excel and made a list. But, here is one of the cool things about this software... it actually LOOKS UP information for you. For instance, I just pop in the CD and hit the "CDDB Lookup" icon and it searches the Internet database for the CD and fills in the album notes (titles, artists, dates, track titles). In SECONDS... meaning I don't have to do it!! And there is even an icon for the EJECT CD... I don't have to hit the button on the side of my laptop... it just pops open when I hit the icon. Talk about a slacker's dream! For books, you enter in the ISBN number, or the author or the title.... and up pops the info. For movies, it's a bit trickier. It searches IMDB, which is a great resource, but sometimes it has multiple choices for the title you type in... and you have to hit the enter key and hope that it is really the King Kong you actually have, not the 1938 or whatever year the original came out. But, definitely a big improvement over entering every blessed detail yourself.

If you are interested in something like this, you can purchase AVCataloger at http://secure.nc-software.com/AW/aw.aspx?A=151.