Time Saving Tuesday
Sometimes it is astounding the collection of DVD’s, CD’s, games, and books people have. For some individuals it gets to the point where they don’t even remember what they have anymore. In fact, I’ve known some people who would find themselves purchasing the same movies over again simply because their collection was so vast that they couldn’t remember if they owned it already.
To solve problems like that you need to turn to a full media organizer, and luckily there’s a free one available which we’ve received several emails about over the last few months. It’s called Libra, and is capable of managing books, CD’s, movies, games, and DVD’s on Windows.
–Managing Collections–
Libra is available for both Windows XP and Vista, but the interface for Vista does have a bit more eye candy. Beyond the beauty also lies a lot of functionality. The size of the thumbnails on the virtual bookshelves can be adjusted so that you can see more or less at any one given time. This is done by using the slider in the upper-right corner.
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It’s also possible to change how the media is sorted on the bookshelves. By default everything is grouped by type (books, games, movies, etc…), and are sorted by the title. Anything can be sorted in about a dozen different ways, which ultimately puts the control in your hands.
–Adding Media–
Obviously a program like this is only great if it makes adding media from your library a piece of cake. I would have to say that Libra is pretty simple from that standpoint because it uses Amazon’s vast database of information to grab details and box art for all of your media.
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Searching can be done according to the type of media that you’re looking for (books, games, movies, etc…), and then results can be shown from Amazon’s United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, France, or Canada sites.
Naturally you’ll probably start searching for your media according to the names, but that will probably take awhile in the end. What I recommend doing is searching according the ISBN/EAN number, or even by the UPC. Don’t feel like entering in the UPC? If you have a webcam hooked up to your computer that’s not a problem. Just hit the webcam button and focus in on the UPC. Libra will read the UPC and scour Amazon looking for a match:
I mean really, could you ask for any more?
–Loaning to Friends–
Anytime you’ve got a good collection of media going it likely means that you’ll have friends crawling to your doorstep looking to borrow items at no cost. No problem, right? You lend a movie to one friend, a game to another, and a couple more movies to a few more friends. You eventually get to the point where you are relying on them returning it at some point in the future, but as many of us have experienced your friends need a few reminders.
Libra to the rescue! There is a loan feature in Libra so that you can keep track of who has what. Just find the movie that you want to lend out, click the “Loan” tab, select who is borrowing it, and pick a date that you would like it returned by:
You’ll want to create a profile for each one of your friends and family that borrow movies from you, but after that it takes just a few clicks here and there to keep track of who has what:
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–Overview–
As you can tell this is an extremely powerful application for the media gurus out there. There’s a lot more that you can do with Libra, and we would love to hear from some of the people who have experience with the application. Shoot us your feedback in the comments below.
Ant Movie Catalog is the best I’ve found. Little eye-candy, lots of options. A simple but powerful little database that is well designed and free. It can search dozens of (if not a hundred plus) movie directories to find the synopsis for the movie/tvshow you’re looking for, including AMG and IMDB; and many foreign movie directories for pretty much any genre. It will also grab the artwork.
Really… it’s the best I’ve seen and it’s free. I’ve got 500+ DVDs to keep track of and it’s nice to be able to search for, say, ‘Paul Newman’ or ‘1967′ or ’sci-fi’ or ‘kids’ or ‘animation’ and see the listings– quickly.
Definitely worth a try if you’re trying to catalog your dvds.
[antp.be]
This looks like a very nice application, but I assume that it uses a local database file, so it’ll probably not very well across multiple computers (please correct me if I’m wrong). I wish there were something like this only Web-based.
That definitely looks nice for people who don’t want all of the eye-candy. Thanks for mentioning it!
That’s correct, the database of your videos is stored locally on your computer.
I have been using Collectorz for a number of years and it has served me well. [collectorz.com]
Kevin
When downloading, I red couple of comments on cnet. Someone says that Libra is a Spyware. Is there a way to find out if it is an Spyware? Or has anybody heard about this? Or is it the ONLY bad comment about it?
I had this installed a while back and norton and ad-aware didn’t think it was a spyware Rez. I only uninstalled it because the prgoram had trouble remembering some of the options that I put in manually, but I keep an eye out on this project and will probably try it agian when a new version comes out.
Like Kevin, I’ve been happily using Collectorz for my books and CD collection. As at this moment I’m not so happy with their licencing policy, I’m looking for something else.
A problem I’m often experiencing though, and it also goes for Libra: it’s difficult to find programs that are also useful to non-English speaking people. I have a lot of Dutch books, which cannot be found on the Amazon sites. Collectorz is good for this, as it also searches library sites, including the Dutch national library. As a result I don’t have to add many books manually.
Check out listal. It seems to be akin to Libra, and it’s web based.
[listal.com]
I’ve got both Windows Defender and Eset Security Suite running, neither of which flagged the software as spyware.
Dkong, thank you so much; it looks exactly what I was looking for.
Another one using Ant Movie Catalog here
Would be nice if all of these apps would support easy exporting/importing so you could switch easily.
It would be nice if all applications worked that way, but I don’t think that will ever be the case.
Has it escaped everyone’s notice (including Ryan) that regardless that this application has much interesting potential it seems to have “died on the vine”? There is no evidence that it has been supported or that the authors have even acknowledged any questions for many months. Too bad as since the ability to quickly input a large number of items with the bar code is particularly valuable for those of us with stacks of stuff to be catalogued. In my case, too many to start a system by manual input.
I don’t know much about working with bar codes but would be grateful to anyone who could point me towards a way to input my collections as Libra would if it worked better or if I could get a few questions answered about its’ implementation.
Just because it hasn’t been worked on in a few months doesn’t mean that it is totally abandoned. The developers obviously weren’t trying to make a lot of money off of the software, and I don’t think you can really complain when you didn’t have to fork anything over for it.
With all due respect, Ryan, it hasn’t been worked on for A LOT of months. More important and more discouraging is the apparent total lack of response to any questions posted on their support forum. I’m not blaming them – it’s their choice – maybe they went to the beach. I just think that it’s too bad – Libra a neat package with some innovative ideas.
I disagree as to their trying to make money. Yes, we all get the software for free. But they are (or were) a successful commercial enterprise with a track record of which they seem (justly) proud. As they have stated in their documentation they are/were trying a new business model – generating revenue from Amazon adwords. That’s why the application only goes to Amazon for data. I’m not complaining and I’m happy to have the software. But the inference that the authors were contributing their work for the “greater good” and therefore I should just be thankful (and quiet) is not correct. I think they were hoping to make a whole LOT of money. I hope they do!
Do your homework, Ryan.
There are a lot of applications that go for extensive periods of time without receiving updates, and yes I do see that in the forum people are talking about the developer not being around for awhile.
And just because it isn’t updated doesn’t take away from how valuable this can be to some individuals. We’ve written about plenty of programs in the past that haven’t been updated in years, yet still serve a valuable purpose.
It’s like saying that if we stop writing on our site it will instantly become dead because it’s not being updated. That’s not the case at all. We still have a lot of past articles and reviews that people will find useful for years to come.