Organising your music collection

Cataloguing you CD collection may be old fashioned, but there's something so easy about doing it using your Android phone that it makes you want to. Perhaps its the bar code scanner that can pull in a wealth of detail about your music.

But it took me a while to find the best for my needs. Here's a summary of apps to consider (or to reject outright).

PackRat: Really wanted to like this app - it looked good, but it totally failed to find several items, and force closed when I tried to go into preferences.

Memento: found it to be useless: scanned a code but then didn't pull the details in.

ScanPet: Oh so pretty, and oh so confusing. Scanning creates an Excel file, and seemingly nothing more.

Shelves: Now this one I could get to like, with a clean interface and accurate scanning. Only the detail view of an item is simply a review - and while there is more to see if I edit an item, it still doesn't include a track listing.

Collectionista: I liked this app because it does pull-in the track listing. I did think it left a little to be desired - mainly because it went straight into a full edit if you click on the image. But it looks good.

And the Winner: Inventory. Almost too simple, but I loved the scan accuracy (it even offers suggestions if there a close matches when scanning). You can view an item, then choose to edit. And of course having the track listings in the details is great. On the other hand, there are details in the listing that can't be edited. It does have a focus on ownership (allowing you to specify who you've lent an item to), but is quite customisable.

QR codes and Apps

You've created your first app, so how can you drive traffic to it? Using a QR code is one way.

Your App 'ID' in Play (formerly known as The Market) is actually the package name, so it would be something like this: com.delphis.DestiDom.

So the URL to the website would be:

http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=<com.delphis.DestiDom>

and a link directly to the Market would be:

market://details?id=<com.delphis.DestiDom>

Using a QR code creating service like http://delivr.com/QR-Code-Generator
we'd then come up with our QR code!

Backing up the SD card

Most smartphones now support 16Gb or more SD cards, and all that data needs backing up. You can turn off, remove the SD card, put it in a card-reader and into your PC and copy it over. But there's an easier way.

Obviously that's the point of the USB cable - data transfer. Use the Data Connection Type option as disk drive, and your phone's SD card will appear as a drive in Windows, for example.

But for flawless copying be sure to put the phone into Airplane Mode for the duration of the backup - I've found that events such as incoming calls interrupt the data transfer.