Collecting is perhaps the most stupid hobby a human being can submit to. I mean, really, I could have taken up knitting or keeping my somewhat flabby frame in shape, but, no, I had to go for collecting … of all things.When I was young (yeah, right) I collected stamps, especially those with any space-related depictions. At that time I didn’t care that most of those were geared towards collectors or came from states that were not much bigger than the stamps they issued. Then I focused on Scandinavian countries because I lived there for years and today I have limited my activities to getting newly-issued Danish presentation packs. Still, I ended up with several cupboards full of albums.

Then I collected books - contemporary horror fiction, to be more precise. It all started with a Stephen King book and went on from there, both backward (to the “Pulps” and beyond) and forward (until the end-90s) in time. Today I have eight vitrines full of the stuff (actually 11, but the rest is paraphernalia) and often kick myself for not having sold the lot before the market went belly-up. On the other hand, I will most definitely get around to reading the 400 books I never opened more than twice and, on a more serious note, I enjoy the collection time and again.

I also collected other stuff, but my media collection - which once upon a time consisted solely of cassettes, LPs and videos and today is a vast conglomerate of four (!) cassettes, (some) LPs, thousands of CDs, more than a terrabyte of digital files and close to 800 DVDs - is the one collection that has been growing steadily these past four decades … mostly unnoticed (yeah, right).

No matter what I collected or am collecting, I invariably reached or reach the one point at which I lost or lose track of what I had or have. In former times, I then chose the tough route, filing stuff away by hand.

My stamps were easy to arrange in albums and never reached the number of items that was unmanageable. No problem there.

The books were another matter. Because I was and am an avid fan of short stories, I began to gather duplicates almost from the get-go (the best stories are reprinted often enough to avoid frostbite in bitter winters). After I had reached a thousand small file cards and while in a phase of virtual unemployment - which lasted for several months - I wrote my own relational database (first utilizing FoxPro as a backend. then Paradox, then Access) which still works fine today and lists, by type as well as chronologically, all issues or reissues of any book or story below any single given title (as opposed to having one “file card” per item). It was a pain in the neck to maintain, but if I ever want to sell the whole collection, I just need to hit “Print” and a nifty list is off to a potential buyer. Besides that, I still believe my own creation is better than most commercialy available library programs, although it most definitely isn’t foolproof and only I (me, myself and I) can run it without major failure.

The music was never a problem. I shelved it A-Z, then I split it up into genres, then into sub-genres, then, … err. That’s when the trouble started. I just had too much. For years I was proud of not having bought any album I already had, only to discover that - of course - I had done exactly that. I was also sure I could remember everything I wanted to get, only to end up flabbergasted in the middle of some megastore, surrounded by really everything I might have wanted, and without one single clue as to what I should have been hunting for. God, I felt like an utter and complete idiot.

Ergo: Collecting makes you feel old … as well.

A few months, or perhaps a bit more than one year ago, I decided to surrender to my dysfunctional habits and beliefs and get some darn order into things. And because I have always been an avid PC (and Sinclair, and C64, and Atari, and …) user, I thought that there must be a ton of software out there to help me escape my severely limited human state.

Little did I know.

Sure, there are thousands - if not millions - of more or less useful programs out there, but no matter what I tried, I always came up short. There was that one function missing, that one print template that couldn’t be created, that one cryptic title that blew apart any preconfigured database field, etc. In short, there simply wasn’t anything that satisfied my needs.

Two choices then:

a) Write my own and throw everything in there but the toilet brush.
b) Give up and use a combination of programs to get me what my addiction demanded.

I chose the second route.
What a surprise.

I had been down the path of writing my own program and knew that what I wanted and needed would not only take me a year to write and test but might also fall prey to evaporating into the bits and bytes that are the great software cemetery in the sky. Hell, I had once used Paradox (great DB program) only to see it die a death of a thousand bytes. I wasn’t about to go there again.

So, I started testing, trying, yelling and screaming, pulling out the little hair I have left and whatnot.
I even got myself a purple sweater.

[snip]

This is where I’m at today:

01) Backpack (by 37signals)

In a nutshell, Backpack (affiliate link) is (much) better than sliced bread. It’s a nearly idiot-safe product that allows you to store just about anything you like online:

Lists?
- Of any length, shape or color …

Notes?
- Yep, and as many and as long-ass as you would like.

Excerpts?
- Copy, paste, save.

Photos?
- Upload, label, bingo!

Music files?
- Upload and store for all eternity.

Instruction manuals?
- I used to never know where the damn things were. Now I do.

(Important) Mail?
- Forward it to any of the 1000 backpack pages I have.

Important dates?
- Add them to my calendar … and share them with anyone I please.

Appointments?
- Invite people and coordinate them.

Want to share with like-minded people?
- One click is all you need.

Happened to stumble over some info and need to jot it down
- Send it via mail to your backpack pages to be stored.

Prewrite stuff?
- Use “Writeboards”.

Addresses and contacts?
- Use “Highrise”.

…

Get the drift?

This 37signals stuff rocks!
Let me explain why.

Their products are not perfect … and 37signals are the first to admit that. But they have so much going for them that one is simply stupid - especially in my situation - not to take advantage of what they have to offer.

For me, personally, the one single killer “feature” is that I can keep 98% of my work off my own PC. Contrary to popular belief, that’s a good idea. If you have blown as many Maxtor drives as I have, have lost the amount of data I have (both on main drive, backup drive AND stupid limited DVDs … all at once), you are ready to embrace what 37signals has to offer and, to be brutally honest, you’d probably sleep with the entire staff although, as far as I know, they are all male. Tough luck.

Backpack and Highrise have become my lifeline. Besides organizing my professional and private life (shouldn’t that be lives?), their products have enabled me to free oodles of time which were once sunk on trying to keep my collecting habits, my general - somewhat meager - organizational skills, as well as my online personality (personalities) manageable and in check.

I’ve tried enough software to make me scream and having come across 37signals about 12 months ago was akin to a Joycean epiphany: Before I get too melodramatic here, let me give you some examples:

a) I keep every list (to-do or not) safely stored and easily managed on my Backpack account. If I find something online, I copy the link and/or the description and add it to any of the preprepared lists on my account. If I happen to be in some remote record shop and find something I might want, I ask someone (worked every single time so far) to allow me online access to check if I really want said item, need it … or can afford it (my entire budget is online as well). If some anally-retentive employee does not allow me a brief online glimpse, I access my stuff via another medium or location within minutes. I haven’t spent a Euro (that’s more than $1,50 as we speak … HA!) too many since I signed-up for an account.

b) Although blogging software is meant to aid your creativity, I prefer prewriting my posts for this site on Backpack. Why? Nothing gets lost. Yes, it’s really that simple. I’ve accidentally deleted or lost a shitload of mile-long entries because my server(s) failed, the software failed, the Internet failed, God burped … or because I had one Venezuelan Cacique (=(Rum) too many … Backpack is more forgiving. Never lost anything, has saved every single revision, can fall-back to any previous version. You get the idea.

c) Abroad? Got an Internet connection? You’ve got every single bit you ever entered into Backpack a single (or a maximum of two) mouse-click(s) away. I don’t know about you, but I’ve gotten stuck in the most remote places trying to figure out if I had this or that, where X or Y lived, or wondering when my birthday was. The answers were all one login and one click away.

d) Schizophrenia: I’ve had digg this and bookmark that accounts, I kept wishlists and note clips, I had remote connections to my PC and terminal access to my root accounts. I killed all of that, every single digital diversion, and have everything on Backpack. All. Of. It. Safe. And. Sound. Have you got a myriad of accounts floating around? Thirteen different user- and password combinations to remember? Data overload? Yes? Try Backpack.

e) Ease of use? 37signals have dumbed it down to perfection. I know that expression is almost a derogative, but in this case it isn’t. Even my parents - who once hid in dark and smoky basements from allied bombs hailing down on their heads - can use it. If they can figure it out, so can you.

Yes, Backpack, Highrise and a number of other online utilities 37signals provide are not perfect (formatting idiosyncrasies and at times weird behaviour), but they are so damn close (and fix everything and anything once it becomes known) that I went for them, hook, line, and sinker. And thousands of others did as well, so what are you waiting for?

37signales was instrumental in reducing my online time and the hours, days and years spent organizing my eclectic life cycle(s) so substantially that the $24 a month I’m spending right now (plans range from free, via $7, $12, $24, $49, $99 to a whoppin’ $149 for multi-national corporations) are the best darn dollars I have ever spent. Bar none!

Oh, yeah, they’ve got a message board, chat rooms and an orgasmic variety of other goodies depending on what you go for.

‘Nuff said.

02) Music Collector

There are a million database programs out there to help you organize your music collection. I think I’ve tried them all. If you are anything like me, I’m sure you’ve tried a huge chunk of them as well. None of them could ever satisfy my (your) needs, some of them I reviewed in the past or relatively recently, and most of them sucked.

I ended up with “Music Collector” for various reasons. First of all, you can just shove a CD into your CD-drive, or type in the UPC or the title and then download just about every bit of information via various linked-in databases … the “Music Collector” one, Amazon sites around the globe, and others. Secondly, the program is supported by a loyal user base that has weathered many a storm. Thirdly, the program is updated frequently, especially with feature requests submitted by users in mind. Fourthly, there are a ton of print and export templates that satisfy my needs (and if there weren’t any, I could easily create them myself).

Yes, there are pitfalls. If you are interested in sessionographies, if you want to assign musicians with a certain instrument (and not all the others played on other releases) to a single track or album, you are lost (or too dumb, like me, to figure out how to do it), you are at times dependent on user-submitted data which might be incorrect (the loyal user base usually takes care of that within a short period of time), and there are other deficiencies originating from my very own requirements, but the program has enabled me to file away what I have in a much easier and faster way than others I tried have been able to. All in all, “Music Collector” has helped me avoid spending money on stuff I have, has helped me locate different versions of songs I have, and has aided me in printing, viewing or exporting complete discographies of any musician I have in my collection. That’s enough for me, although your mileage may vary. Just checked: I have over 30 versions of “Lady Be Good”, although there are probably another hundred or more floating around; “Music Collector” told me so, at the click of one button.

03) Mp3Tag

This program by Florian Heidenreich is the one and only program I use to tag and retag my digital files. I came across it when an illness kept me down for months on end and it helped me (re)tag a positively huge collection of digital music files. There is virtually no format this tagging program can’t handle and I went through gigabytes of files like a warm knife through cold butter. I’m not even going to mention the number of digital files I have, but if you are as anally retentive as I am (that means listing/tagging each file family name - first name and adding a ton of info to the available tags), this is the one program to tag your files via file names, downloading info via various sites (freedb, Amazon, …) and adding - to name one feature - leading zeroes to track numbers. The possibilities are limitless, especially because you can basically do anything you like by screwing together scripts to enhance the program. Hell, I haven’t even started mining the depths of what this program can do. Suffice it to say that two years ago, I retagged more than 200.000 files on a weekend (OK, I didn’t sleep all that much, but still …). Did I mention it’s (almost) free?

04) 1by1

Yes, I admit it. I fell for the skinning abilities of many players, I was a WinAmp user ever since I could walk and talk digitally, I used Foobar because geeks said it was great, I tried a trillion other players to get “more head” … and at the end I downloaded 1by1 … and was happy.

See, I had already tagged all my files to perfection, so what the hell did I need bloated software for to give me that extra geek appeal? Organized and sorted music libraries? I already had one. Did I really need those two million plugins, the visualizations, the enhancements and the slick skins? Did I need any additional resource hogs? Nope. I needed a player that would list the folders I had and play stuff once I threatened it with a single click. 1by1 does that. And more. I’m ashamed to say that I needed more than 10 years to find it. No cool skins, no fiddly features, nada, niente, zip, zilch. Click and play … to perfection. Love it.

05) Assorted geek stuff

Yes, I have more programs, but they only add to the experience the above four supply. See, I do make covers for CD and DVD rips, not the covers other geeks make but the ones that a) save ink, b) help me distinguish burns from the real thing and c) let me use templates for every darn CD or DVD I need to make a cover for. So, being a teacher, I got myself an educator’s license for just about everything Adobe ever put out, especially Photoshop and InDesign. Coupled with my Canon Pixma IP4000 (which doesn’t have one of those “there’s still six liters of ink but I’ll deny that until you pour acid on my wiring” chips installed), I’m one happy camper. I can discern the burns within my vast collection via one single alcohol-infused glance.

I use programs to check the integrity of my digital files, I use some that help me rename vast directories (several hundred or thousand files at once) by programming a single renaming mask, I use photo and picture databases to store covers, scans and screenshots, etc.

But, when boiled down to the nourishing marrow, I use Backpack, Music Collector, Mp3Tag and 1by1 … and that’s it. I can do without the rest.

In fact, I’m in the process of designing and assembling my own PC, with silent cooling (my current PC sounds like a helicopter on crack) and few enough programs to free space for my huge collection of digital files, and you can bet your cute rear ends on the fact that I’m trying my best to limit the number of programs to below 20. Maybe 10.

I’m trying.

P.S.: What do you use? Alternatives, programs for declicking and denoising, storing, cataloging and tagging? Let’s have ‘em. I’m always interested.

P.S.S.: If you happen to be somewhat illiterate - and most of us screwy collectors are - the title of this post refers to one of my favorite novels, “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad (only pushed into the shadows by James Joyce’s “Ulysses“, a book most of you would probably throw Oasis albums at). Read Conrad’s magnum opus, but not only because it was the literary foundation for “Apocalypse Now“, a great film that nevertheless failed to capture that absolutely eerie atmosphere of its literary blueprint. In said film, Marlon Brando excelled .. at being himself … but Conrad excelled at creating the literary equivalent of a sublimal kick in the ass. Heavenly.

Categories: (01) Collecting
Tags: computer, online, software