Music Cataloguer

This tool is used to catalogue all or part of your MP3 collection for personal use, distributing to friends or even publishing on the Web as an Internet site. You can create fully customised HTML lists or text lists of your MP3's quickly and easily using Music Cataloguer. You may choose the columns in the lists you produce to include any information that is available in the ID3v1 Tag, ID3v2 Tag and MPEG information of the MP3 files and may be in multiple pages so that each page is limited to a number of entries you specify.

In Music Cataloguer, you will be presented with an output window on the right of the main window and a number of controls on the left. These controls are placed in sequential order from top to bottom to guide you in using them in the correct order.

To create a catalogue:

1. Select the type of output you want to create for your catalogue using the HTML or Text option buttons.

2. Make sure the Music Cataloguer (HTML/Text) Options are set how you want them.

3. Specify the number of entries you wish to appear on each page in the Entries per page text box.

4. Specify which ID3 Tag in an MP3 to use in preference when ID3 Tag-specific columns are being used. Click for more info >> This option is used when any of the following information is being included in the catalogue listing: Track Number, Title, Artist, Album, Year, Genre, Comment.  Each of these are available in either the ID3v1 Tag or the ID3v2 Tag.  The one that is used depends on your Reliability Preference selection.  Of course, if the field of the selected ID3 Tag does not exist in an MP3 file, the other one will be used.

5. Press the Build button to produce in the output window a catalogue of all the MP3's displayed (and checked) in the MP3 Scanning Centre. Click for more info >> In order to save you time, Music Cataloguer does not build a complete catalogue initially.  Instead, the number of pages that the catalogue will be made up of (based on the number of entries per page specified and the number of Scan Results being catalogued) is calculated and the appropriate number of Output buttons displayed.  The actual output for each page of the catalogue is only compiled as each Output button is pressed.

6. If an HTML output was produced, the Preview button will be available. Pressing this will display the current HTML output page in your default Web browser so that you may see how your page will look before saving the HTML code to disk. The Preview button is not available for Text output since the output displayed in the output window is how it will appear when viewed in an ASCII text editor.

7. Type a name to use for the main part of the output file names in the Output File Name text box. This will be used as the file names to save to disk when you press the Save button. Click for more info >> As displayed in the Music Cataloguer window, each file saved to disk will be appended with a three-digit number indicating the number of output that that file represents followed by the appropriate file extension for the output type selected (".txt" for Text output and user-specified for HTML output).

8. Press the Save button.  This will open a Browse for Folder dialogue where you may specify the location to save the output files to.

I want to:

• Customise my HTML output page

  Music Cataloguer allows you to customise just about every single aspect of how your HTML page will look.  You can choose the fonts and their colours of different parts of your page, use your own background image, set margins, and many other things.

   

  See also:

  • Music Cataloguer (HTML) Options

  • HTML Cataloguer Page Properties

  • HTML Cataloguer Header Options

• Change the order in which the columns appear in the output

  The order in which the columns appear is specified in Music Cataloguer (HTML/Text) Options.  Just use the and buttons beneath the Included list when an item is selected to change its position.

• Alter the width of individual columns in the output

  This option is only available for Text output. The width of columns when producing Text output must be specified as the number of characters required for each column. To do this, in Music Cataloguer (Text) Options, click on the item whose width you want to change in the Included list ensuring that you click in the Width column. A spin control will appear for a short period. Use this to adjust the width of the item selected.

   

  Notes

  • There are limits for the width of each column available. Click here for a list of these maximum values.

  • HTML output produces HTML code made up of <table>, <tr> and <td> tags.  The widths of columns in these tables are not stipulated in the code.  They are adjusted intelligently by the web browser according to the width of values in the columns, the number of columns in the table and the width of the browser window.

   

• Remove some of the information placed at the top of each page of the output

  In Music Cataloguer (HTML/Text) Options, press the Header Options button. Here, you may choose which information is displayed at the top of each page by checking or unchecking the relevant check boxes. For example, if you want to display the total size of all files in the list, just check the Total size of files check box:

  

  See also:

  • Music Cataloguer (HTML) Options

  • Music Cataloguer (Text) Options