CDpedia - 4.5.4

It is good in all the aspects including a great possibility of options what, for experts of Classic music and Jazz, it is important...
Highly recommended.

The application looks nice and is well laid out, but the track information doesn't seem to be searchable.

Tis really is a 'classy' application. Rock-solid, nice to look at, easy and intuitive to use - very, packed with features, yet with a highly well thought-out interface, they're offering this major upgrade free to existing users.

Amazing.

Well done - and thanks, Bruji!

The title says it all. I downloaded both CD- and DVDpedias to try out; so double disappointment. True, barcode scanners nowadays are very affordable, but who doesn't want to avoid yet another piece of hardware if there's one already built in? And the iSight image is still in black and white. Oh, well ... ...

Data management, performance, stability: Not tested, due to the 10 CD limit of the unregistered version. (CDpedia might behave very differently when the database contains 1,000 CDs instead of 10.)

Interface: Clean, well-designed, integrates well with Mac OS X. Main view is customisable, and visible data can be edited, but editing full CD info requires a separate window.

Database design: Geared towards Western pop music collections. Adequate for this job, but inadequate for anything else. Two major flaws: no track "Composer" fields, and no provision for titles made up by more than one CD.

Data export: Fairly extensive export to plain text files, including HTML, CSV and tab-separated. Most export templates are HTML, but custom text-based templates can be added.

Data import: Import from CSV and tab-separated text (not tested), but not from tagged text. Direct import for some applications; direct import from iTunes database is limited (only playlists can be imported, not dismounted CDs). No import from CD Info.cidb, no custom templates for tagged/structured text. (Cover art import not tested.)

Data input (manual): Through CDpedia's form; well designed, but not customisable; limited copy/paste capabilities.

Data input (automatic): From on-line databases; info from on-line sources can also be added to existing data. General limitations are those of the databases: music other than Western pop is more often than not unavailable or incorrectly listed, classical music data is painfully mangled, etc. However, there are significant CDpedia-specific issues: no custom templates to access other sites; no spell checking; scanning mounted CDs is hit-and-miss; and others.

Scripting: No AppleScript support, so repetitive tasks can't be automated (huge flaw).

Conclusion: If stability and performance with large collections are good, then it's a useful tool for an average user with a collection of mostly Western pop music. The dedicated music lover, who wants his database to hold more data is going to be disappointed. CDpedia is equally unsuitable for classical music and for non-Western CDs. It doesn't handle well Macs with more than one CD/DVD drive, and its capabilities can't be extended by scripting.