Van Gils Blogs

I’ve been looking for a  tool to manage my music collection for a while. At first, a couple of years ago, I considered building one myself. Since I have little time that didn’t seem like an option. The featuers that I want are:

•  be able to add data about vynyl, dvd’s, and cd’s
• web-based so I can share info on my website
• possibly with a client that runs on my laptop (windows) or my computer (linux) that does CDDB lookups (i.e., look up the information from cd’s online so that I don’t have to type them in manually)
• possibly also store things like cover-art and lyrics
• the back-end has to be web-based and preferably run on a LAMP (Linux – Apache – Mysql – PHP) platform

I’ve looked everywhere and haven’t found what I was lookin’ for. I’ve seen some pretty impressive tools targetted at the Windows platform but that’s out of the question. Anyway, this is sort of a last chance: does anyone know of a good tool for music management that meets my requirements? Otherwise, back to the drawingboard and try to find the time to build something myself…

At work we have bought the Borland toolset for developing software. We’ve had a project team to implement and integrate these tools into a coherrent set. Frankly, they’re stil working on this toolset. Makes me wonder … Anyway, today I got a seat (i.e. access) for this envorinoment. I tried one thing: to make a half decent component diagram in Together, and it failed!

 It amazes me that after spending so much money we’re unable to perform even the simplest of tasks. The idea is to make a component diagram, add a component and change its stereotype to e.g. <<subsystem>>. So far so good. However,  there is an extra stereotype (<<component>>) which presumably represents the metaclass of the current element. Therefore, the component I just added has two stereotypes which is plain ugly. And there’s no way to get rid of the metaclass stereotype. Yuk! Time to start looking for another tool if you ask me.

The new ubuntu (Gutsy) has arrived. It’s perrrrrrty! Unfortunately the upgrade from Feisty failed. I think that was mostly my own doing by the way. I did a fresh reinstall and was blown away. I’ve seen a lot of nicely implemented systems lately (the latest Mac being one) but I most say that Gutsy tops ‘m all in terms of good looks. Well done.