A suggestion... an app to add physical media

I have a feeling this will fall to the floor quicker than an expensive ornament in a house full of cats, but I’ll say it anyway.

One thing that upsets me greatly about the death of the Music Collector windows applications, is potentially losing the ability to add physical media, i.e. scan a CD and add it to your collection, add an album of MP3 files.

Please, pretty please, may I suggest a tiny Windows app that does that, and only that? Scan a CD, choose from a list of matches from the Core (or FreeDB), and then have that added to your personal CLZ Web collection?

Similarly with MP3s / FLACs, drag them into this app, it extracts the metadata and submits them to the CLZ Web collection.

At the moment, I can (thankfully) still add these using the old application, but I know the day will come when this will go dark and I’ll be stuck with having to enter all the details manually.

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Although I understand what you want, and why you want it, there seem to me to be several considerations:
(1) MuC Windows and Web are VERY different from one another. Windows supports full details for tracks, and also has a Tracks view. Web has minimal details for tracks, and no track view. So, if you are a “power” user, the way you would use the Web product is very different from the way you use the Windows product.
(2) The world is changing. CDs and digital downloads are being replaced by Vinyl and Streaming, so what you require will become increasingly niche.
(3) There are lots of ways to add Albums (Barcode, Catalog No, Artist/Title) so there should not be much data entry.
(4) There are lots of products out there which do exactly what you asked for. Two free products I use are Foobar2000 and MediaMonkey. If you still need the extra functionality that MuC provides the you could add the CD, MP3 or Flac files to MediaMonkey, export the result as a CSV file and then import into CLZ Web. Though see point (1). You may find that Web doesn’t really handle the tracks for you, and so will never do what you require.

If a simple, bare bones app could be developed to import cd or file data, I think that would be a winner and would negate so much of the noise from those of us who are worried about losing this capability. If Web had track data available, and there wwas a simple way to import file data, I would be ready to abandon MuC.

Thoughts about a mini-app being able to scan a CD, or scan files and send that to Web have been around for a while, and perhaps it’s something we can do at some point - but there’s also “noise” on “track view”, and more track fields.

We’re hesitant to bring one of the most support-inducing things (scanning files and extracting data, dealing with all those different folder systems, smart combining, all that stuff which is in the Windows version as a massive monster of a support-problem feature :slight_smile: to the web version. Especially in a time where we’re indeed seeing that cataloging / ripping files is definitely on the way down. I’m not saying it will never happen, just what we’re seeing, our thoughts.

Maybe at some point we can tweak the import on Web to deal with like a CSV containing album artist/title and a list of tracks that the user can create themselves using Foobar, MEdiaMonkey or a different filecataloging/ripper tool.

Hopefully for most albums you can simply type in the barcode and find it, or type in the Catalog Nr. which can get you the album data from Discogs.