OFF: insurance for CDs and/or tapes ?

[Frank Weil]

> > Enter each and every CD into a database that you keep updated.
>
> Anyone here done this?  What system do people use?
>
> The all-manual-way would of course be easiest, but it's not very
> convenient for other purposes: different searches, hooks for Codex,
> etc.
>
> So the choice should be computer-based.  I personally would like an
> application which could be used on many different platforms.  For
> example these days I use only Unix-systems both at home and work,
> but might use something completely different in a few years).  The
> ideal solution (for me at least) would be to use Perl (maybe with
> some database) and have some nice ASCII output formats, including
> HTML.  Err, sorry for that technical comment; I *am* a computer
> nerd.

That is exactly how I keep track of my collections.  I use flat files
in the style of bibtex (keywords at the beginning of lines, blank
lines separate records).  I then munge these files with Perl scripts
to print reports in whatever format I want.  The advantages are that
it is portable to both Unix and PC systems, I don't need any special
or proprietary database formats, and standard text-processing tools
such as "wc" and "grep" can be used to answer certain simple queries.
On the negative side, tools such as "grep" can't be used to answer
more complex queries such as "What album contains the song 'We Care a
Lot'?".  It isn't hard to write tiny Perl scripts to do these types of
things, though.

Frank

--
 ==============================================================================
Frank Weil | frankw at comm.mot.com | phone: (847) 576-3110 | fax: (847) 576-3240

Basil: I'm afraid most of the people we get in here wouldn't know a
       Bordeaux from a claret.
Guest: A Bordeaux IS a claret.