MacOnMacs: Keeping Your Media Organized
With all the media that people accumulate nowadays, it's getting progressively harder to know what you have and where it's stored. My favourite Mac application for this type of task is Delicious Library.
Delicious Library helps you catalog, browse, and share all your movies, music, books, and video games through an attractive and easy-to-use interface. To enter your media data, you can type in the title to search and information is downloaded from one of a half a dozen online sources to fill out all the details you'd every be interested in. However, far exceeding this functionality, iSight and other FireWire camera owners can actually scan in the barcodes from their media to conduct the same search with increased precision and accuracy. Your library can be searched through Spotlight, a Dashboard widget, or other methods (including a voice search!). Browsing is just as easy with media covers displayed on a virtual bookshelf for easy identification, and there is tons of other great functionality: sync your library with your iPod, make custom collections (sort of like iTunes playlists), use the built-in loan management system (complete with Address Book and iCal integration) to track borrowed items, and much more. Winner of Macworld's 2005 Editor's Choice Award, the $40 price tag on this shareware is well worth it, especially for those of us who are starting to lose track of their media purchases. :-)
If you don't want to pay for a media manager, and are more concerned about your movie collection than games, books, and music, then try out the less feature-rich, but still very useful, free DVDManager from Fennel. Movies can be added through a built-in online search or manually, loans can be tracked (including Address Book integration), and your library can be easily exported, complete with graphics, for display on a web page or just for use on another computer. DVDManager is great and free (donations are accepted!), providing the essential functionality (though for movies only) provided in Delicious Library without the monetary commitment. ;-)
I'm sure there is a lot of other similar products out there and I'd love to hear what you like best, so leave a comment to let me and my readers in on your organizational find!
Delicious Library helps you catalog, browse, and share all your movies, music, books, and video games through an attractive and easy-to-use interface. To enter your media data, you can type in the title to search and information is downloaded from one of a half a dozen online sources to fill out all the details you'd every be interested in. However, far exceeding this functionality, iSight and other FireWire camera owners can actually scan in the barcodes from their media to conduct the same search with increased precision and accuracy. Your library can be searched through Spotlight, a Dashboard widget, or other methods (including a voice search!). Browsing is just as easy with media covers displayed on a virtual bookshelf for easy identification, and there is tons of other great functionality: sync your library with your iPod, make custom collections (sort of like iTunes playlists), use the built-in loan management system (complete with Address Book and iCal integration) to track borrowed items, and much more. Winner of Macworld's 2005 Editor's Choice Award, the $40 price tag on this shareware is well worth it, especially for those of us who are starting to lose track of their media purchases. :-)
If you don't want to pay for a media manager, and are more concerned about your movie collection than games, books, and music, then try out the less feature-rich, but still very useful, free DVDManager from Fennel. Movies can be added through a built-in online search or manually, loans can be tracked (including Address Book integration), and your library can be easily exported, complete with graphics, for display on a web page or just for use on another computer. DVDManager is great and free (donations are accepted!), providing the essential functionality (though for movies only) provided in Delicious Library without the monetary commitment. ;-)
I'm sure there is a lot of other similar products out there and I'd love to hear what you like best, so leave a comment to let me and my readers in on your organizational find!
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Del.icio.us | 1/05/2006 08:29:00 p.m.
posted by Jeff MacArthur at 1/05/2006 08:29:00 p.m.
1 Comments:
I still use my PC a lot so I'm constantly switching between my Powerbook and my PC desktop so I wanted a media organizer that would be available for both platforms.
The easiest and the most fun apps I found (thanks to commandN :D) was an online app (or web 2.0 app?) application called Listal.
Listal allows me to create lists of all my DVDs, Music and Books and there's also the tagging feature and of course sharing my various collections with my friends, family and total strangers. I used to use an app called DVD Profiler (for Windows) for my DVDs but the UI wasn't very good and it's Windows only.
Still, Delicious Library looks like a sweet app so I might check it out down the road, especially if I get an iSight.
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