CD-DB

I've bought, collected, and ripped my own CDs for a very long time.

Some of those old rips were done in a terrible quality and need to be redone, and I might as well rip them to FLAC for archival purposes.

So I wanted a list of CDs I own, at least the important ones that I have on my shelves, from my favourite bands.

Now I know there must be a ton of systems that have all the fancy features, but I didn't know their names and after a brief web search I could not find anything that matched my needs, or they didn't advertise those:

• scan barcode with mobile phone
• look up and fetch the metadata
• export all the data
• have a non-shitty phone app without ALL permissions

So in the end I built something for myself.

I found barcode-scanner which is web-based, can be self-hosted and mostly did what I wanted.

I made an ugly 7 line patch that added a simple link that opens in a new tab with the scanned barcode as a GET parameter.

Then I wrote a small PHP script that

• takes a ?barcode= parameter
• checks the MusicBrainz API for that barcode
• writes the result (parsed and raw JSON) to an SQLite db
• shows an error if nothing is found
• alternatively also takes an ?id= parameter (we'll come to that)

So this is how it works:

• take a CD from a stack facing back side up
• scan a barcode
• tap on the last link shown
• check the new tab for errors
• close the tab
• go back to the barcode-scanner tab
• keep the CD out of the stack on error

For the ones with errors I search the title of the album on MusicBrainz, then find a somewhat matching release and copy their MBID and manually call my script with it. Really important is just the track list here.

I didn't exactly pay attention but I think I did not have to manually look up more than 10%, maybe 5%. I scanned 160 album cases as the first batch and I think I had to look up like 10-12.

Finally I wrote a small table view with filtering on that same SQLite DB, and I already had the filtering JS in a different project.

Time investment: maybe 2h and < 300 lines of code

I guess just typing the 160 album names with artist and title would have taken longer, and I wouldn't have all the metadata.

Now I guess I just need to find more CDs and then compare to my mp3 folder and get to ripping stuff.