Tracking Your Music Collection

Computer users who have a large music collection can use gmmusic to
track their entire collection. Built as a desktop application using the
popular PostgreSQL database to store all the music information, gmmusic
lets you organize your disc collection as well as look up songs by
artist, search for your favorites, and track all of the discs you own.

Gmmusic, which can be downloaded at
http://gmmusic.sourceforge.net/prog/gmmusic.en.html, takes advantage of
Gtk-Perl (http://www.gtkperl.org) for Perl routines that create Gtk-and
GNOME-based user interfaces on a desktop system. This fits in well with
the GNOME desktop and hides all of the database access.

Gmmusic depends on a number of other Perl modules, which makes
installation a bit difficult. If you have ever installed Perl modules or
used the GNU configure scripts, then gmmusic should not be all that hard
to install. Most of the required packages come with modern Linux
distributions. For example, just about every Linux distribution includes
the PostgreSQL database.

Gmmusic uses freedb (http://www.freedb.org), an online database of disc,
artist, and track (song) information, as a free replacement for cddb,
the now-commercial database that also holds the same type of
information. Cddb has proven quite controversial since it became
commercial.

If you have a large number of CDs, as I do, then you will never have
time to enter in data about each disc. That's why one of the best
features of gmmusic is the ability to insert a CD and have it look up
the information using freedb. Most of the disc information is
automatically entered, which saves you a lot of typing. Gmmusic does not
support this feature on all platforms, though.

One of the scariest features is that gmmusic can tell you the value of
your collection, or, at least, how much you paid for all your discs.

Also with gmmusic, you can create the CD case inserts for your disks,
listing all the songs. You then print out the inserts, cut then down to
fit a jewel case, and place in the CD case. This is quite helpful for
CDs you burn yourself.

» posted by ITworld staff

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