- ouch, ashwken, ouch! You know, sometimes....:

Within the last couple of weeks I have deleted 2.300 album playlists, each placed inside the respective album's folder, each list's content sorted per track number, - because I hated them!

-Curt (November 02, 2009, 05:36 PM)

I hear you, and realize that my current "need" is a bit out of the ordinary. I've returned my attention to Music Collector and it has a feature for Linking a playlist with an Album, which is why I started looking for this type of tool.

The SnapPlay looks like it can do the job, but it still fails to launch on my system at home, have dropped the author a note.

Re: your original post

You mentioned the problem of having to re-read your library everytime you wanted to generate a playlist, not sure but you might want to look for something that builds a media library within the program. Foobar does this, but I've only started to explore it. I've also seen mention of a couple of other programs that claimed this feature but I couldn't point you to anything specific.

Well I did go ahead and purchase SoftCAT - it can scan all folders, it does have a lot of useful fields pre-configured, and it also gives me 18 user-configurable custom fields.  This will certainly do.

@ashwken: One last note on putting my Excel sheet into UR.  Sorry - not to try and besmirch UR but I cannot see any utility at all in doing what you suggest. Get all the data into Excel, then have to export it out again into a CSV file, then import it into Ultra Recall but only after defining all the attributes first (notice this is s heck of a lot of setup work?!).  And even if I manage to get it all in there, finally, I cannot do anything at all with that data.  It would be completely static - frozen in time, so to speak. Why wouldn't I just keep it in Excel instead of going through all that? At least I could then add to the data there.

I honestly cannot see even one good reason to put it into Ultra Recall.  I guess that Kinook can say that this technically (and I do mean a true "technicality" in the barest sense) lends legitimacy to the claim that I can import an Excel sheet into Ultra Recall, but that's very thin, IMO.

-J-Mac (August 02, 2008, 02:29 AM)

J-Mac,

I have agreed from the start that if you want the ability to scan a system for software then UR is not going to be of much help.

I was originally under the impression that you had a good percentage of the data already in Excel, it was later revealed that you were working with three separate systems and that there was only data for one system in Excel. If you remove the desire to scan a system for software you are left with having to enter data manually, something that you had been doing with Excel.

My original suggestion of using UR was as a replacement for Excel, and subsequent posts dealt with the method of moving the existing data from Excel to UR, then you could abandon Excel.

Although UR is not going to be able to scan your system for installed software, if you were cataloging a software library, you could bring these files into UR (probably linked) and the UR Item(s) created from this import would contain the Attributes that you had been working with in Excel (that are now being used in UR). Yes, there would be some setup required in UR, but this is always going to be the case when you are designing something yourself rather than using an existing application.

Additionally, within this same software catalog, you could have a folder that contains Items for each of the systems you want to track, software Items could then be linked to the desired system. UR would also allow you to store additional information about (web pages and such) the software and the systems you are tracking.

I'm not saying that this is a superior method, but that it is an alternative solution with limitations and advantages. Your decision to purchase SoftCat is probably a good one based on what you want to do.