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CDPedia v2 vs. v4

Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2009 3:41 am
by dirkpaul
Hi all,

A few years ago I bought CDPedia v2. I worked with it for a while, even published part of my CD collection online (which was the most important reason for me to buy it - you can find it at http://homepage.mac.com/dirkpaul/cds/). However, I more or less abandoned the program after that, for the following reasons:

1. I found the possibilities of customizing the HTML too tedious. I could adapt the design of the HTML pages, but it was too hard for me to change the way the albums were organized, i.e. split them over pages or something like that.
2. I never found a way to have CDPedia interact with iTunes the way I wanted - I could import my iTunes collection, but if I recall right, there was no way to sync - if I had any change in my iTunes collection, I needed to manually select which CD's I wanted to add to my CDPedia library.

So, work stopped, and I didn't work with CDPedia for quite some time. However, I want to pick up administrating my iTunes collection - I'm importing all my CD's in iTunes now, and I want a visual web interface for my CD collection somewhere. Now, it is entirely possible that these problems were (in part) caused by my own incompetence, but for now my most important question is this: has CDPedia v4 changed in any way in those two respects?

Thanks.

Dirk Paul
Amsterdam

Re: CDPedia v2 vs. v4

Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2009 6:52 am
by Conor
Number one should not be a problem. The new HTML export splits movies into a number of options and creates an index as well for the pages. It uses the currently sorted column to split pages and it can do it alphabetically (good for title) or by the entire word (good for genre). It also has more basic splits such as one page per movie or X number per page. It also has the ability to create a details page for each movie, so that the first indexed pages just have a minimum of information.

Number two would still be an issue as you can import playlists but it won't automatically import or sync all new entries in iTunes. But by creating a smart playlist in iTunes with all the entries after the date of your last import you can import that collection to update CDpedia.

The demo version will let you work with an import of your iTunes collection so that you can try it out and see if it fits your needs. When you import a large collection in the demo version it will no longer let you edit the CDs but you can experiment with the export, to try out the editing have less than 25 entries.