In keeping with my new saying “If you stumble on a barcode reader in the attic, then everything needs to be barcoded and/or scanned” I scanned in all my CD music library. Why? Because 1) I can, 2) because my wife and I are trying to declutter our home.
Over the years our home has been taken over by stuff. My stuff, her stuff, kid stuff, our stuff, and just stuff-stuff. Not to the point of being labeled a hoarder, but enough stuff as to want to pair down a bit.
One large nuisance has been music. I have four milk crates of old LPs and racks and boxes of CDs. Since my wife and I each got an iPod and a way to play them through the various stereos in the house, the physical media never gets used. So why should the CDs stay in my living room when they could easily live in my garage (of moderate temperature).
But before doing so, would it not be nice to sort the CDs and get an inventory? And look, most of those disks have a barcode on them! All I have to do is scan them in! So I opened up Excel and scanned in each barcoded CD. Those that were missing a barcode (perhaps a dozen out of 250) I just typed in the title and artist.
I then figured I could simply look up the barcodes online at www.upcdatabase.com. Wrong. Two problems.
1) Not all UPC items are in this crowd sourced database. If nobody has bothered to enter some esoteric Hawaiian native singer into the database, then a lookup fails. Crumbs.
2) Not all the barcodes are UPC codes. Seems that music has its own barcode system. The above database does not track music codes and I was unable to find one that does.
But all is not lost. I did find that simply entering the code number into Goggle brings up the album most of the time. Now it is just a tedious job of copying the code from Excel, pasting it into Google, then going back and entering the title and artist found back into Excel. Forty down, 180 to go.
PS: The LPs are still a problem. We sorted them and keep those that are “unobtanium”. The ones we can buy as CDs or downloads we will replace as we fancy and try to sell them to a used music store.