So Long Music Collector, long live connect?

Music CLZ Music Web
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Well, I’ve just read the news that Music Collector is essentially discontinued, and now I feel physically sick. It’s like I’ve been shot in the chest. I’m going to spend the rest of the month wearing a black armband in honour of this devastating news.

Anyway, I have a few questions, and no doubt I will have more.

Is the “Connect” software ever going to have the feature to scan CDs? I have no idea how this would work, so I suspect not. Are we going to have to solely rely on barcodes and artist / title searches? I have found these to be less accurate than scanning the CDs themselves, often with timings missing and 2 discs showing when there’s only one disc.

In a similar vein, is there going to be a way of scanning files?

Is there ever going to be an “F2 edit” mode like there is in Collector? I use this feature ALL THE TIME and I find that this is a huge benefit, especially when adding individual items like barcodes.

Is the CSV Export ever going to be improved? I use this feature a lot - I keep a record of my albums in an SQL database, which I import from the CSV. It takes seconds to do this in the Collector app… a long, long time in Connect, especially when you’re almost 20,000 albums deep. Also, I don’t see a way of exporting the tracks for the same puprose. Again, about a minute in Collector. I dread to think how long it would take in Connect.

What are the plans for the long term future? I have been on the net for 30 years now, and it’s no exaggeration to say that every online service will die eventually. As you say, the Collecttorz app will keep working “for as long as possible”. What happens after this time? What will happen to my online Connect data if CLZ ever got bought out, gets hacked, or there’s a catastrophe such as the OVH Cloud fire?

I feel like I’m going to be on edge now the entire time I use the software, waiting for the day my entire daces worth of collecting goes up in virtual smoke. Still, I guess I’ve saved some money as my Collector subscription renews in 30 days!

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Thanks for considering Music Connect.

It is not really discontinued. It is still supported and in maintenance mode.
It is just that our development is focussing on Music Connect now, so it is unlikely that there will be any significant feature updates for Music Collector.

No, that is not going to happen. Web-based software, basically a website running in your browser, cannot access your CD-ROM drive for scanning CDs.
Also, less and less users actually have CD-ROM drives in their computers, so adding scanning CDs is going to be less and less reliable because of less submissions.

Adding by barcode is the way to go.CLZ Music mobile app users have been dealing with just barcode scanning successfully for over 10 years :slight_smile:

Same, a website in your browser cannot access your drive for scanning files.
Won’t happen, I am afraid.
Also, Connect is web-based software, meant to be used from any computer and any mobile device. So linking to local files that are on one specific computer does not really fit that portable nature.

Music Connect can generate a CSV file just as fast, but maybe the downloading of the CSV file is the problem here? Not sure.

Exporting track lists is indeed not possible in Music Connect.

I have seen more desktop program die, to be honest. Most our competitors that had desktop programs are dead by now.

If anything like that happens, you will have a problem anyway, even if you are still using the old desktop software. If our servers are gone, it will be quite dead in the water.

My recommendation after reading your post: just stick with the Music Collector desktop program.

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I have been using Music Collector for upwards of 20 years. The majority of my collection consists of live shows and bootlegs recorded by other collectors thus they have never been officially released and obtained through trading or file sharing. When I started, I would burn the files to CD’s before cataloging. As my collection grew to over 10,000 CD’s I abandoned CD burning as they were too unstable. My entire collection which is now more the 21,000 albums, CD’s and music files (most are in lossless format) resides on a couple of hard drives (11-12 Terabytes) and are backed up on 25 gb blu rays and an additional backup on M-Discs which supposedly has a lifespan of over 100 years. Currently there’s more than 460 Discs of each. I know it’s overkill but it’s saved my a** more than a few times.
I still have several thousand shows & albums to catalog and I’m continually adding to the collection. I have customized some fields and always try to add artwork whether it be album covers made by others or actual pictures from the show if available. I spend a lot of time searching the internet for pics of long ago shows. I also occasionally will capture and save reviews of the shows when I run across them in the notes section. I don’t use the Core at all as the majority of my files are audience recordings and soundboards which rarely show up there.
My collection is broken up into 4.7 gb folders burned onto the Blu Rays and M-Discs. All are cross-referenced in Music Collector so that I can find them quickly. I make sure to add metadata to all the music files with Artist Name and Title and mandatory. The song titles are either in the metadata or the file name or both. The total runtime of all my music is 1420 days (3.9 years). I play them on a DAT player through my stereo system in the order that they have been cataloged. I am listening to music now that was cataloged back in Nov 2017. I doubt that I will ever listen to whole collection as I am 75 years old. I stored all the CD’s I burned in CD storage binders but many are filled with digital noise and are unplayable.
My muc file is over 200 mb and my images folder is 3.4 gb. I restrict the image size to a a maximum of 500 pixels on the shorter of height or width. I use front back and backdrop images when I can. Both are backed up on separate drives.
I would really be hard pressed if I could no longer use Music Collector. Connect may one day grow into what Music Collector is now but until it does I’m sticking with my desktop Music Collector.

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For some background on this, please read my post here:

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Hi!

I would really love a way to export the albums (selection) for instance where title includes ‘Bach’. Why? I want to use chatGPT to compare ‘my list of tracks’ ere the text include BWV numbers with lists on the internet of Bach’s works.

Can you please consider this?

Sincerely

Fredrik Nilstromer

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Exporting those as an album list is possible. But just not with track lists includes.
Unless you export to XML? That will include track lists.

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Okay, will try xml export!

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YES! I made it. XML-export, followed by a Pythonscript, generated a text-file with 64 lines (one per BWV). This made it possible to start a prompt with ChatGPT in order to compare my list of BWV-numbers with lists on the Internet and what I “would like” in order to fill certain gaps to get a more complete Bach BWV-list (depending on my interests and taste).

Are there any API-thoughts at CLZ? That could be an alternative to XML-export?

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Wow, what a neat idea!