I am one of those people who prefers the Windows + Mobile versions of the products. This topic is aimed at like-minded users.
My Music Collection in Windows makes a great deal of use of Track View, and contains a lot of information (Composer, Composition) at Track or Header level only.
The trouble with this is that this information does not sync to Connect / Cloud / Mobile, so that these products are less useful than they might be, as some data is lost.
Some time ago I made some half-hearted attempt to fix up the data so that it might work with Connect, but I could never create anything close to my original system, which was as near perfect as one could wish.
In the light of Alwin’s statement (Collector desktop vs Connect web-based) that the future of Collectorz is with Connect, and that Windows will slowly drift off into the sunset, I decided to have another go at making my data Connect compatible, but this time, instead of trying to create something which is perfect but diffucult and time consuming to implement, rather to go with the flow, and create something which is as good as possible within the constraints of Connect.
What a revelation.
Since I was dealing with Classical Music, I simply copied the Composers and Compositions to Album level. Multidisc albums I often split into single discs, sometimes joining them together as a box set, and a few other things of little interest here.
Now everything works really well.
- in Album View in Windows, as well as Connect and Mobile, I can list albums by Genre/Composer, which I couldn’t do before. It is not quite as good as the track view, but I would still rate as 95%.
- Getting rid of multidisc albums means I can store more images (front and back cover per disc)
- Adding new albums is far, far easier, as I can rely on the Core data, and have to do far less editing
- Because of the way “inheritance” of the data works, this new information does not affect Track View or Templates in any way.
As well as Mobile now working really well, I now am not worried if the Windows product is dropped, and I have to move to Connect. I am not going to do this for some time, as I want to keep all my existing data, and also I want to be able to tweak things so that I know everything is as good as possible - but I am ready.
The point of this post really is to suggest to other Windows users that it is worth testing things out with Connect (or Cloud and Mobile) to see what may or may not be lost, and what you might need to do differently, and if there are any changes that need to be made to your data, to start making those changes now, at your leisure, rather than leaving everything to the last minute. And you might be pleasantly surprised, as I was, that dropping features from Windows is not nearly as bad as it seems, and may in some ways be benefical.