Review By Jason Kessel

Lets face it, while digital music downloads have exploded over the last several years, many of us still have music on CD. Sometimes, people even archive their digital music downloads to CD. If, like me, you've got a large collection of music albums ranging from CD to digital downloads, you might be considering a way to organize and catalog your music. If you have a Mac computer, look no further than Bruji Software's CDpedia.

Not only does it allow you to catalog and organize a list of your music albums, it also stores information for each album such as track listings, cover artwork, original release date, CD release date, price, UPC, a nice summary and much more. You can even rate your favorite albums from 1 to 5 stars. Those of you who use iTunes should be familiar with rating your music.

Speaking of iTunes, the interface of CDpedia should look very familiar to iTunes users. All the way down to the infamous "cover flow" view. Not only is the interface similar to iTunes, but it also interfaces well with iTunes and your existing iTunes music library. For example, if you are listening to music in iTunes, you can add that album to CDpedia with a simple menu click. You can also import your iTunes library right into CDpedia. A feature that would be extremely useful for people who have most of their music as digital downloads already in iTunes.

Adding CD albums also couldn't be any easier. Simply insert the CD into your Mac and CDpedia will gather information about that album via the internet and the freedb.org online database. Another unique feature is scanning via iSight. If you have an Apple iSight, you can scan in the UPC code with CDpedia to add that album to your library. Of course, you can also add an album manually or by doing a search. When you add an album by doing a search, CDpedia will search various websites such as Amazon for the album you are looking for. Once you have chosen the correct album, click "add" and CDpedia drops in all the information about that album. One thing I didn't like about adding by search was the inability to add multiple albums from the search results window. For example, when searching for "Pink Floyd" CDpedia found all the albums and listed them. If I wanted to add Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall and Animals, I had to do three separate searches and find all three albums and add them individually. It would be nice to be able to make multiple selections from this window to add them.

The organization tools in CDpedia are top-notch as well. There are "smart collections." You can set as many or as little criteria as you like for each smart collection and CDpedia will sort your CDs accordingly. Then every time you add a new CD to the program, the smart collections will automatically update themselves so you don't have to. Do your friends like borrowing your CDs? Then CDpedia can help you there too. It can keep track of who borrowed which CD at what date and when they are supposed to return it. CDpedia will even email the borrower a reminder when they need to return the music they borrowed. Very cool!

Wanna share your list of albums with others? CDpedia has excellent exporting capabilities. You can export your "pedia" music collection to HTML, .Mac, FTP, Text and to an iPod. Exporting to HTML allows you to view your collection in any web browser. CDpedia even has some nice HTML templates to choose from, even some for the iPhone and iPod touch. It's a great way to have access to your pedia library on the road. Unfortunately there is no synching option yet between the iPhone or iPod Touch and third-party apps like there is for the iPod, so viewing your pedia collections on those devises will require exporting HTML to a web server and accessing it online. Hopefully synching with the iPhone and iPod touch will become possible in the future.

Overall, I really like this software. For someone like me who likes things organized, this software is a godsend when it comes to organizing a huge music collection. I'm looking forward to trying Bruji's other "pedia" software such as DVDpedia. For more information about CDpedia or Bruji's other software, visit: www.bruji.com. Price: $18 - Available directly from Bruji Software.