Being a collector for years, I have always had a complete and accurate list of all the items in my collection, as well as a detailed wish list. In the 70's I had a notebook with hand written lists with information from The Book of Lists, Rock (a great book that I purchased each year of publication). When computers came onto the scene the "manifest" moved from handwritten to Lotus Notes, then eventually to Excel where it resided for many years until I discovered, probably through PE but I can't recall specifically, RYM (Rate Your Music).
In 2008 I dedicated myself to RYM entering my entire collection manually and then diligently updating the collection and want list in RYM since then. Over the first decade of RYM use I would probably encounter 1 or 2 releases a year that were not in their database and it was easy for me to add. Lately, last 3 years probably, the number of instances in which the album I am trying to add is not in the RYM database has grown exponentially. ** If anyone else has experienced this or has insight into why it's happening, I'd love to hear**
That phenomenon prompted me to seek out alternatives, of which there seems to be one, Discogs. I've been buying through Discogs longer that I can recall, however I never thought of it as a tool to house the collection manifest. I did some research and anecdotally find that Discogs has a larger database, more entries, and more detailed entries than RYM, all important for folks like us who more often than not are collecting oddities and rarities. At the beginning of this year I make the decision to move the collection data from RYM to Discogs. I soon discover that despite all the forms in which I can extract my collection data from RYM, there is not one to simply upload the data to Discogs. Everything points to manual entry for the entire collection and wishlist. Now I am staring at thousands of manual, detailed entries, that need to be keyed in by hand.
I've been working for the last several weeks and have just made it to the C's. Not bad, but boy is it tedious. I take the opportunity to listen to back of the shelf albums as I am going along and have rediscovered quite a bit of music from back in the day. I hope to complete by the end of the year. Wish me luck!
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Originally Posted by mozo-pg
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