CD Catalog Expert Review

When you have a lot of CDs or DVDs it is very hard to keep track of what you have exactly on each of them unless you create a catalogue or some form of list of contents and store it somewhere on your hard drive. For example, the computer magazines usually add a CD/DVD disc as bonus, loaded with small pieces of software (free or shareware). If you collect such discs, you might want to remember easily where to find a certain program or file. CD Catalog Expert has been on the shareware market for a long time and it offers a very good solution.

  

The interface is well embedded with the Windows Vista Aero shell (on the main site it is stated that it supports Windows 98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/2003/Vista). Since the 3rd of February 2007, the 9th version of this program has been released and a lot of changes have been made in order to improve compatibility with various media storage units: a new generation of database format, the kernel was rewritten, the user interface has been improved and the search function optimized. The functionality has also been extended with hierarchical categories, “favorites” features and with one more type of exporting format, XML, while the HTML/TXT format has been optimized.

   

There have been some improvements until the program reached the 9.22.7.826 version and even if the name remained as “CD Catalog Expert”, the DVDs are also supported. In each catalog you can create categories and start adding disc content information in each category you create according to the category name. As an example you can create a category called Audio CDs and then you can all your mp3 CDs by “scanning” them. The same can be applied for DVDs or hard drive partitions you may wish to add to the catalog.

   

Applicability:
Large collections of CDs or DVDs could be very well numbered and gathered in such a database contained by the catalog created using this piece of software. Why would you need to create such catalogs? For fast access, obviously! Just imagine what it would be like to have a pile of discs on your table and to start searching for some data on each of them… It will (probably) take a lot of time to find the right disc. You can save hours of search with such a program and find what you need in an easy and quick search query through the database.

Pro(s): The program is highly efficient and very useful for companies that deal with a lot of media storage units because of its indexing capabilities.

Con(s): What I didn’t like about this program is that when you create catalogs in it – you cannot rename or delete files from the indexed disc content: as an example – you have some catalogs that you wish to share with some friends, but some of the discs also contain some (private) files/folders you wouldn’t want anyone else to see – the only solution would be to re-burn the CD/DVDs without those – but that is not always cheap or convenient, especially if there are any. Maybe the developers didn’t even think of such a function, editing the indexed content that is, but other famous CD/DVD indexing tools do have this option.

Official site

Buy: $29.95

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