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Delicious Library: Personal media management
Merlin Mann | Feb 1 2005
First—no question—it’s just really fun to use. It’s satisfying to hold up a CD, hear the little “I got it” tone, followed by the robot voice reading back the info on your latest entry (which it pulls down automagically from Amazon.com). Once entered, catalog items can be modified, sorted, munged, and grouped however you like using an elegant bookshelf metaphor. You can also view related titles and do other stuff with your collection via Amazon info and links. Although, candidly, it’s a little cheesy that a $40 commercial product won’t let me change the Amazon Associates ID from theirs to my own (or that of a favorite charity, or what have you). That really should change in a future release. I’m also not sure how useful the “who did I loan this to?” function is. I’d be much more interested in seeing those cycles go to collaborative filtering, a networked “friends” functionality, and more web services integration. I guess it would be useful if you trade or lend lots of stuff, but I thought the pre-populated list of people from my address book that it “guessed” I’d trade things with was kind of creepy and a little crufty. Lovely and innovative as it is, I’ve only found one purpose where Library would be really persistently useful to me. Saturday morning, I cleared off two full shelves of old programming books that are destined for a new life in cardboard boxes in the basement. I scanned the 40 or so titles into Library, and then organized them into sub-groups (they call them “Shelves”) corresponding to which books were in which of the three boxes. Now if, God forbid, I ever need my O’Reilly book on programming Access, I know exactly where to go. Super handy, actually. There’s still a lot to like about this program, though, just in the sense of fit and finish alone. It looks amazing and completely polished. The search works pretty intuitively, but I’m not sure, for example, how to see which shelf an item belongs to; in the example of my book archiving idea, how would I search for a book and then see which box it’s in? So, a lovely UI, cool functionality, but nothing just yet that would make this a must-buy for me at US$40. I’ll definitely keep watching this app with anticipation, though, because I think it has a tremendous amount of potential as a personal information and media hub. For what it’s worth, here are few features I’d find handy in future releases.
I do encourage you to download the demo and give it a spin. It’s a testament to the beautiful work that smart designers and developers are doing with OS X these days. Delicious Library. Media management application. OS X only. $39.95; Demo available. Download. Buy. 63 Comments
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 Just wanted to share how...Submitted by Steven Travers (not verified) on February 7, 2005 - 2:02pm.
Just wanted to share how I'm going to use this program, to respond to those who can't see a use for it. The big thing for me is that it helps me to save space. I have large collections of around 1200 CDs, several dozen DVDs, and several hundred books. It's a drag to have multiple DVD and CD racks and bookcases in the living room of my apartment displaying everything. Takes up too much space. With 1200 CDs, it was too much of a pain to keep them in alphabetical order, and I could never find anything too easily. Sometimes, if i wanted to hear a particular tune right away, it was even easier to buy it from itunes than to look for ten minutes for the disc. :-) Also, moving all those CDs whenever i change apartments is a huge bummer. So heavy. So, because of the weight and space they took up, and because i wasn't having any easy time browsing my CDs in their 6-foot bookshelf style rack, i decided to remove jewel cases from my life. I took all the discs and artwork out of the jewel cases and gave away the empty jewel cases. I put each disc and booklet in its own separate paper and cellophane sleeve, and put them into thin cardboard boxes (99 cents each at The Container Store). This way i can still use the big CD rack that i have. See photos of this setup here: http://snipurl.com/cltf This saves a ton of space. Each shelf on the CD rack can hold nearly 3 times as many CDs now. So, you can't just stand there and look at the spines of the CDs and browse that way. Because the spines are gone. You have to take out one of the boxes and flip thru the CDs like you would at a record store, as if they were vinyl LPs. I gave each box a letter (A,B,C...), and when i browse the CDs onscreen in the software, i can just look to see which box it's in and retrieve it if i need to (or bring it up in itunes if it's ripped onto the hard drive already). I'll do similar things with books (w/some of them going into boxes in my storage room, saving space in the living room) and with DVDs and games (with those items going into the DVD size wallet-style storage cases that hold the discs, paired with the artwork inserts or game booklets--I'll get rid of the plastic keeper cases, saving some space). I plan to make a 3-ring binder with printed out sheets from the software that'll live on my coffee table and will allow me to browse my CD collection and other collections as easily as flipping thru a magazine. It'll make life simpler, and it'll make my living room look more grown-up without all those playstation games out in plain sight. :-) » POSTED IN:
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