Klarinet Archive - Posting 000238.txt from 2006/01

From: "Karl Krelove" <karlkrelove@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] (OT) Barcodes and CDs
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 23:34:04 -0500

A couple of years ago my drives were badly hosed by some sort of malware.
All of my MS Office data files were corrupted, including the MS Access
catalog of my LPs and CDs I'd been keeping updated for years - I had
actually ported it over from a TRS-80 database I'd started building when I
got my first computer in 1981. Naturally, I had backed it up. Unfortunately,
the backup was also corrupted because it was on a second drive in the same
machine (lesson learned). This bug took no prisoners. Anyway, I'm beginning
to miss being able to quickly look up what's in my collection and what
recording it's on, an ability that's often handy. I just haven't been able
to get up the energy to re-type all the data by hand into a new database, so
I'm looking for a way to automate the data entry.

I've been playing with a barcode scanner to see what it can do to speed up
some of my organization tasks at school. It occurred to me that most of the
CDs I own have a UPC barcode on the paper liner that comes in the jewel
case. Some of my newer LPs even have them. Of course, they're used now at
the stores' checkout counters for pricing and inventory control, but I
wondered whether each UPC's association with a particular recording is
maintained by the vendor's inventory department or if perhaps the UPC codes
are contained in some central registry, maybe a recording industry-wide
database. The dream would be to be able to scan the UPC with my barcode
scanner and have all the information about the recording pop up on my screen
somewhere so that I could save it or, better yet, directly into a data file
set up for the purpose. Utilities like Winamp and Windows Media Player seem
to be able to access a data registry of some kind - I assume the information
they scroll across the display comes from an online source because the
programs complain if for some reason I'm not online when I put a CD in the
drive.

So, (1) is there any database that connects the UPC on the box and the
content of the recording that would useful for this? Or (2) can I somehow
pull the information from Winamp out to a disk file that I could later
import into Access?

Karl

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