Thursday, March 20, 2008

Organizing my CDs

I'm not very good at housekeeping (hate it) or organization (sign of creativity?) but after listening to Santana the other night and deciding we'd like to buy more music CDs I thought it might be a good idea to organize what we own. They're already arranged alphabetically on the shelves within categories like rock, classical, jazz. But I've got over 100 CDs so I thought it made sense to catalog them all in a database. Easier to keep track of what we own especially when they're often scattered all over the stereo equipment instead of in neat little rows.

So I spent a couple hours today using Window Me's poor excuse for a database, MS Works, trying to create this great compendium. There was a template and it even allowed space in each record (a record is what each entry is called) for 24 songs. Problem is many of my CDs are 2 disc sets. While it only took me 30 minutes to type in the information of 19 music CDs it took the other 1.5 hours figuring out how to add a second disc to each record. Normally, it would be intuitive because I spent years using both Excel and DBase IV. But this MS Works database is a castrated database and it fought me tooth and nail the whole way. I won despite the lack of directions and poor help menus, but my addition is not very neat looking. Still, it ought to be work fine till I get to my classic music where some composers are in 3 CD sets.

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