Anyone who knows me, knows how much a media-phile I am.
Migrating a few years ago from Windows to the Mac OS X platform, I was found wanting a decent application to catalog all of my DVDs. With over 800 DVDs, the issue of “real money” comes into play. Examples: lending out DVDs to friends; searching for specific TV show episodes; a complete catalog in case of fire. The list goes on.
There’s a company called Bruji (http://www.bruji.com/) that produces a suite of “pedias” (as in encyclopedia, not child). They are quite good and a great value for the price. Bruji bundled offers allow you to purchase three of their products for less than the cost of a single equivalently featured product from other software vendors. I’ve purchased the bundle including DVDpedia, CDpedia and Bookpedia.
There are three minor bugs that all three products share. After sending an email detailing the bugs to Bruji, I received a very prompt and detailed response the next day from Bruji's support acknowledging the problems and with the reassurance they are working on the enhancements. One customer’s bug is a software house’s feature, I guess. Regardless, I was impressed with the quick response and candor. The response was not automated either, which I found refreshing. Of the three minor bugs, the one I wish to describe here has to do with mixed monetary values. One nice feature that all three share (and would assume the same with Gamepedia) is the ability to include a monetary value with purchased media. When adding entries from online data bases, like Amazon.com, the products will seed the price field with what ever was found in the online data base. If you mix monetary values, then the total dollar value of the library displayed goes crazy. Not a critical flaw, but annoying. The other two bugs (in my humble opinion) were related to navigation. Neither a big deal and not worth going into.
Regardless of these relatively minor flaws, these products are well worth having if you posses any significant number of DVDs, CDs or Books. One item to add about Bookpedia. The books can be any type of printed material. My Bookpedia data base has everything including magazines, printed sheet music, paperbacks, IBM mainframe manuals and hardcovers.
Another usage suggestion pertaining to all three products relates to their online search facility. Works really great and really like the ability to cascade from one site to the next. After installation, though, go the Sites pane of the product's Preferences, then select only those sites you feel are pertinent to your media collection. You can rearrange the search order as well. Bruji includes a very nice list, but search takes a while when cascading through the 20 or so websites listed. Not a bug nor a complaint, rather a user specific customization action that is recommended.
Don't forget the Plug-ins! There's quiet an impressive set of free Plug-Ins available on the Bruji site for their products.
Lastly ...
Have you ever wanted to back-up those items you've purchased via iTunes to another hard-drive instead of being forced to create a stack of DVDs? Or, for that matter, having to muck around with TimeMachine, which works great as long as you want to back up just a few things or everything. As far as I can tell, TimeMachine cannot back-up just those media files contained within a playlist. Wish TimeMachine could. There is, though, a wonderful free application on Sourceforge called iTms-Backup (http://sourceforge.net/projects/itms-backup/). It will copy all items in the "Purchased" playlist to a folder external to iTunes. If you select a folder on an external hard-drive, you have your back-up. And it's free!
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