Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Your experiences with disc catalogers and most wanted/used features

<< < (5/7) > >>

KenR:
Ha ha, Ken. You sent me off checking out Broken Cross Disk Manager (which I liked) on thiss thread and I, too, wound up buying WhereIsIt? (which I love) the night before last. I feel exactly as you do - I can't imagine finding anything better. Note, though, that Crush (OP) did test WhereIsIt? as part of his own shootout and gather that it didn't fit the bill.
-Darwin (March 16, 2007, 06:09 PM)
--- End quote ---

I read that review (or think I did), but didn't really come away with that opinion of it. Also, having lived with both of these programs, there is really no comparison. I wish I would have found Where Is It? before buying Broken Cross, but I looked and looked, scoured the internet, asked people, blah, blah, blah. So, what can you do? Also, I don't think Broken Cross is bad, I just think that Where Is It? is infinitely better with clever, creative, and novel features for how the information is stored and organized IN ADDITION TO the information the programs acquire. So for my money, it collects more and organizes it much better.

Thanks for the reply on this on Darwin. It's interesting you and I had exactly the same experience.

Ken

MerleOne:
There is also Disk Explorer, shareware, at http://www.tjelinek.com/main.php?section=dh

Your experiences with disc catalogers and most wanted/used features

Crush:
I also like Whereisit very much (but don´t use any Disc-Cataloger regularly till now ... only sometimes Locate32), especially the appearance, the plugins for different filetypes, the speed, usability and the storing format is very reasonable. Please notice that there is no unicode version! At the moment it´s not as problematically, but unicode is used more and more often and all CD/DVD/HD-Formats support and sometimes use it. Only very very few programs (3-4 I think) support unicode at the moment. One of them is the Broken Cross Disk Manager :) that has flipped totally over to unicode and only one supports utf-8. At the beginning of catalogers Whereisit was far away compared to others and even today only very few have its quality and capabilities.  :up:

Now the bad thing  >:(:
Whereisit 3.73 had heavy problems with larger result-lists / databases that have to been loaded at first to memory to be searched. The hardest issues are that the search stopped and the results were shown at about 2/3 before ending the complete search during the last ("*.*"-search) test. After this sometimes an exception appeared that forced Whereisit to quit and even if it seemed to work further, new searches were impossible - only a restart helped. This is only testable with full-versions, because the exceptions only appear with data-amounts higher than the Trial-Version offers. Collections with more than 200 CDs/DVDs should break this barrier from working to issues.

@KenR: Please test Whereisit with about 2-3Mio (file/dir) entries without any plugins activated, searching only for filenames and directories: All special features turned off. Perhaps newer versions don´t suffer from this problem. Repeat the different searches several times - they don´t appear reliable! You can add the same big HD-partitions several times to your database to get this amount of entries.
 :feedback:

Don´t understand this the wrong way: This doesn´t mean, Whereisit is a bad program.

Beside Whereisit there are many many programs with extremely hard issues and I wonder why most of them are commercial ones like Smart CD Catalog Pro 200, Drivescan Plus 2006 3.5b, Analinx Filookup 1.1.120, CD-Rom-Archiv 1.6, CD Bank Cataloguer V2.7.8, AyeahCatalog V1.0, CD Catalog Expert 9, CDCatWin1.01, CD Bank 2.7.6, FileArchivist 5.0, CDTree 2.1.8 std, Disccat 3.0 beta 4, (now some Freeware) MAKara CD Catalog 1.1, NGDiskcat 1.06, Catalog Max 1.66, Gwhere 0.2.3?!!? Is featuritis or laziness the reason? Don´t the developers test their pograms intensively with high and flexible datasets? Perhaps harder problems come up with additional features activated? I haven´t tried this because I was only interested in the maximum search speed during my tests.

So I want to show up that bad behaviour is the norm!!!
I have found only very few one´s that worked in each case perfectly. The rule I discovered was in nearly each case the same: The simplier the program and less the database the more was the probability to work without any problems.

manimatters:
Something that would make a disk cataloging software more usable for me would be the ability to detect whenever any disk is inserted and then popup to ask if that is to be cataloged, if not already done so. It could sit in the system tray to do that as long as it doesnt slow up the system. Any one support that?

Crush:
Lazycat can perfectly do what you want. It´s one of the best of my disc-cataloger tests. Try to get V1.2beta. It´s shareware but has no limit. The development has been stopped 8 years ago  :(

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page