Organize your music, movies and books

If you’ve got a large collection of books, DVD’s, CD’s or games, you may be in the market for a program to keep track of everything. Delicious Library seems to be the most popular choice, but really it’s just eye candy…painfully slow and inflexible eye candy that simply doesn’t have the features a serious collector needs. Also, it’s been around since 2004 and is still on version 1.X…the company’s blog hasn’t even had a post in over 10 months! Another choice is the Collectorz series of programs which are nice but expensive (plus Mac versions lag way behind the PC versions).

In my opinion the best way to track and organize your collections is Bruji’s Pedia series of applications…CDpedia, DVDpedia, Bookpedia and Gamepedia. I have been using CDPedia for over 2 years and I’m here to tell you it’s fast, full featured and very flexible. In addition, the developers are the most accessible and customer friendly folks I’ve ever dealt with in my 10 years as a Mac owner.

I’ve read complaints that the pedias, because they are priced at $18 each, are more expensive than Delicious Library which is a single program for $40. First of all, do you really need a database for books, movies, CD’s AND games? Personally, I don’t own a single game and don’t have enough books or DVD’s to warrant keeping track of them on my computer, so I’m glad Bruji allows me to just get the program I need for only $18. If you do need the additional programs, they are available at substantial discounts when you buy more than one – $29 for 2, $39 for 3, or $49 for all 4. That’s $49 for all 4 Pedia’s versus $40 for the far inferior Delicious Library or $120 for 3 of the Collectorz programs. There’s no comparison…The Pedia’s are BY FAR the best value.

So why are the Pedias so great? Because they feel like they were designed BY a collector FOR a collector. Take sorting as one small example. Any program lets you click on a column header and sort by artist, but if you want to sort by release date, the artists are then out of order – not with CDPedia, which allows me a secondary sort so my 47 Dylan albums can now be viewed together under Dylan AND alphabetically by title or by release date. It’s a hundred little touches like that which make the pedia’s a joy to use.

Every collection within CDPedia has it’s own custom view, so my collection of live concerts shows completely different info (like venue and recording quality) than my CD collection does. I can bring up the artists websites within CDpedia’s built-in browser. I can include reviews I cut and paste from AMG and Rolling Stone. I can print out a report of my collection which includes only the info I specify…nothing more, nothing less. There are plenty of customizable fields, a variety of viewing templates, and you can use your Apple remote to move through a Cover Flow-like screen of your collection (in case you think you’ll miss the Delicious Library “coolness” factor). There are smart collections, it’s wicked fast no matter how many entries you throw at it, you can export your collection to your iPod or .mac or an excel spreadsheet…and on and on and on. Have a realistic feature request? Submit it and there’s a great chance it will be implemented in a future update…these programs are constantly being developed and improved. Bruji really listens and responds to their customers. In short, the program does everything I want it to – and even though your needs will be very different than mine, it will do everything you want it to.

In over 2 years, CDpedia has never crashed, and it’s feature set has never disappointed me…I can’t recommend it highly enough. I only have experience with CDpedia, but I’ve read lots of similar praise for the other pedias (particularly DVDpedia and Bookpedia). At $18 they’re a steal.