This page is part of the online help system for OrangeCD Suite, music database software for Windows. Click here to view full-graphic help index.
Insert audio CD in the computer CD-ROM drive and click menu Album - Scan CD-ROM drive. In an instant, Scan CD dialog box will appear and show the status of the inserted CD album. If this is a new album, it will display a message saying "You can add this album to collection". Press [Add CD] button to download album data and artwork, and add album to the database. Then you can remove the CD from the drive, insert next CD, add it to the database, and so on.
The best approach that allows you to catalog analog vinyl records and tapes is the following method. Click menu Album - Add from Amazon. Type artist's name and album title in the Keywords box. You don't have to type entire title, few meaningful words is usually enough. For example, type 'pink floyd dark side moon' (without quotes) to add Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon vinyl. Then press [Search] button. In few seconds, a list of possible album matches will be displayed. Select an album that best corresponds to your vinyl record and press [Preview and add] button. Review the details of the album before saving it to the database - make sure track titles and artwork are available and correct. Then press [Save] button to add album to database. Otherwise, if you find that some details are missing or not correct or you don't want the album, press [Cancel] to return to the list.
Note: if the albums you are adding are recordings of classical music, you must also check "Classical music search" option for accurate results.
To build a catalog of your media files, including MP3, Windows Media (WMA), OGG, FLAC and other file formats, click menu Album - Scan media files. Select the folder that contains all your media files. If you are not sure which folder it is, you can reference with help files of the application that you used to purchase music online or rip audio CDs. Windows Media Player and iTunes are examples of this kind of application.
Click [Scan] button to begin scan of your media library. The initial scan typically takes few minutes, but subsequent incremental updates are usually faster because they don't result in many additions to the database.
When scan is complete, you will be presented with a list of all new entries added to the database during the process. You can review the albums, change the details if necessary, or add details not provided in ID3 tags by right-clicking the album in the list and selecting Properties.
You can use a barcode reader to catalog your CDs. When your barcode reader is connected to the computer, click menu Album - Scan UPC barcode, then scan a barcode from CD jewel case. The UPC number will be automatically entered in the UPC box. Click [Search] button to commence a search that will retrieve CD information from Amazon database. The search usually results in exactly one album match. Click [Preview and add] button to review the data, then click [Save] button to add the album to your database.
Note: if the albums you are about to scan are classical CDs, you must also check "Classical music search" option for accurate results.
If you need to add many albums in a row, you can check "Add automatically" option to skip album preview step. With this option on, the Amazon search will start immediately once you scanned a barcode, and the album will be automatically added to the database if there is only one match (i.e. nothing for you to choose from).
There are advantages and disadvantages of this method. Using it, you don't have to open each CD case and insert CD in the computer, which means entire process is faster. However, when using barcode scanner to add audio CDs, you may not always get correct track information due to nature of the Amazon music database. Therefore, you will not be able to use certain features that require track times. For example, when you play the album using OrangeCD Player, it will not display the album artwork or track titles because it will not be able to recognize albums without correct track times. FreeDB-related features will also be disabled for these albums.
Any barcode reader that generates keystrokes like normal PC keyboard will work with OrangeCD Suite. We have tested the software with very popular CueCat family of handheld barcode readers, but many other models will work as well. You can test if your specific model is compatible using Windows Notepad application. Create a new empty text document in Notepad and scan a barcode from CD case. If you see digits of the UPC code inserted in a Notepad window, and the resulting characters correspond to what you see on CD case, your scanner is compatible with OrangeCD Suite.
If some of the database entries are missing artwork, or the artwork does not correspond to your actual album cover, you may need to repeat the search and manually select artwork. To search for an artwork, select one or more albums anywhere in the OrangeCD Catalog interface. If the current view does not offer selection facilities, like album or tracks display, it's fine too - OrangeCD will search an artwork for the album that is currently displayed. Right-click and select Download CD covers menu command, then press [Search] button. OrangeCD will connect to Amazon database and attempt to find an artwork for the selected albums. Once the first artwork is downloaded, you can browse the available choices by clicking green triangular arrow buttons, and select the image that closely matches your actual CD cover.
If you still cannot find an accurate artwork for the album, you can use the following advanced technique. Click [Custom query] button and customize the keywords that OrangeCD uses to identify an album. In addition, you can specify which international server to use for artwork search, or force classical music mode by checking corresponding option.
You can easily add new categories, genres, or formats to the drop-down lists, or remove those that you don't need.
To allow umlauts, non-English accent characters, or any other extended ASCII characters display correctly in OrangeCD Suite, click menu View - Preferences. Switch to the Database tab and select a character set that corresponds to your country in the Default character set drop-down box. For example, select Western European for umlauts and accent characters, Cyrillic for Russian language, Greek for Greek etc.
If you added the multiple-disc album using Scan CD-ROM drive feature, you may notice that each disc is added as individual database entry. You can make one multiple-disc album out of these individual disc entries.
When you add compilation albums to the database, you can define artist and composer of each individual track or song.
Similarly, you can define composers of each track in a compilation. Note that to access composer fields, you may need to switch to Classical Layout by clicking a blue link at bottom of the tabbed dialog.
There are two equally convenient ways to achieve it. You can right-click the artist folder in the content tree (assuming you have artist browse mode selected in the drop-down at the top of the content tree). Select Properties command. Artist profile dialog will appear. Enter the artist's name in Last, First form in the Sort name box. Press [OK] to save your changes.
Instead of retyping artist name in Last, First form, you can click [Swap] button.
Alternatively, you can define Last, First name for the artist when you add albums to the database. In the album properties tabbed dialog, switch to the General tab and click the right arrow button next to the artist box. Select a correct Last, First spelling of the artist name. Press [OK] to save your changes.
At this time, OrangeCD Suite does not offer facilities to rip audio CDs or tag media files. We think that there are a lot of great and free tools to do the job already available on the web. We recommend excellent Exact Audio Copy software which is considered by many the best ripping tool. It can be found at http://www.exactaudiocopy.de.
In theory, you shouldn't. OrangeCD Suite extracts track numbers from two sources - file names and ID3 tags, and then it arranges tracks according to these numbers. If the track order is incorrect, it is typically an indication of incorrect or missing numbering in the media files, and the best solution would be to fix ID3 tags or file names and rescan the album.
Still, you can fix the order of tracks in albums that are already added to OrangeCD database by re-arranging them manually. Right-click the album and select Properties. Switch to the Tracks page. There are up/down arrow buttons on top of the list that allow to move one selected track up and down in the list. When all the tracks are in correct order, press [OK] to save the changes.
There is a facility in OrangeCD Suite that allows automatic assignment of unique IDs to each new album. The ID is placed in Reference# field that can also be modified manually on Library tab of album properties dialog. To configure auto-numbering, click menu View - Preferences and switch to the Numbers tab. You can select one of several numbering styles that best serves your goal. When auto-numbering is enabled, a unique ID will be generated for each new album that you add to the database.
If you already added many albums without auto-numbering, or if you want to change the numbering style, you can renumber all albums in the database:
OrangeCD Suite 6 offers extensive set of custom fields. Before you can enter data in custom fields, you need to define which fields you are going to use, and provide their types and names. Custom fields can be arranged in up to four additional pages in album and track properties dialogs. OrangeCD Suite allows up to 10 custom edit boxes, 10 checkboxes, 5 multiline edit boxes (memos) and 5 date boxes.
To configure custom fields, click menu View - Preferences and switch to the Database tab. Click [Customize] button in Custom fields section to enter field customization dialog. Once custom fields are defined, they will be exposed as additional pages in album or track properties dialogs, and can be used like regular database fields. You can add them as columns in the album list, make search queries, or do anything you can do to regular fields.