@phossler, the biggest advantage of using Calibre to manage audiobooks is in my opinion the ability to easily search for them, to browse through the collection and to add detailed information about the audiobook (e.g. short review/summary).
For years I used no special software for managing my electronic media: just a structure of folders and subfolders, and that was it. Sometimes it was quick and convenient, sometimes it would get messy. With Calibre, I found a powerful tool to manage my ebooks. Now, thanks to the cover grid, I get an almost 'physical' feeling of collecting books: I get to see the covers, let my eyes wander
, look at a summary from time to time. With paper books, I would sometimes go to my bookcase and look for something I felt like reading - you don't get that pleasure if you're just clicking through numerous folders
.
This is why I wish my other media were also catalogued in a nice, detailed, visual way. This, and the search options obviously (although I don't need them for my audiobooks yet).
These days, I don't buy many paper books, regular music and audiobook CDs etc. - most media are purchased as downloads, but I want to feel like an owner of music and books, not an owner of thousands of files
.
OK, I might be getting way too philosophical.
That's what spending a couple of days cleaning your hard drive may do to you
@fidvo, thanks for your tips! I guess I'll use the hours:minutes format; putting the total length in minutes has not been very intuitive.
@BetterRed, the date column is also an interesting option.
I didn't realize adding .lnk files had not always been that easy! Just tried it and it worked. I guess I'm lucky
Going through some older threads on the forum, I've found your posts about using .lnk files and hyperlinks. Which of the two solutions do you prefer? And, most importantly, how has it been working out for you?
The thing I'm most afraid of is that at some point shortcuts / hyperlinks could stop functioning (because of files being moved, drive letters being changed etc.). One thing I can do is using a fixed drive letter for the external drive on both of my computers.
It would be great to be able to use relative folder/file paths but there is no way to do that, right?
I want to catalogue lots of files that haven't been properly ordered for quite some time (some have been put into neat folders and subfolders, whereas others have ended up in folders such as 'new', 'latest', 'old', 'to be classified' etc. - you get the picture
). That's why I would not only have to catalogue stuff in Calibre but also order it somehow on my hard drive: which brings the question what would be the best way to do that (e.g. using some meaningful folder-subfolder structure or just one folder to put all the folders with the title of the item and Calibre number - a quasi black-box, so to say). Or maybe it's completely irrelevant? (One potential problem about the 'meaningful' folder structure is that it is tempting to change the structure/move folders later on, and that would obviously require manual modifications in Calibre).
On another topic: I've decided to go with another program for cataloguing movies: EMDB. It's not as perfect, flexible and customizable as Calibre (I feel spoiled now
) but it looks like it does quite a good job. It does offer some customization possibilities, decent options for searching/filtering/sorting, both the table and the cover view, and it downloads covers and information about movies (this was the decisive factor for me, when I realized how much time I would need to enter the data manually into Calibre).
After a long search, I've also found my music library of choice
, which I can recommend if anyone needs a change: MusicBee. Great piece of software, I keep discovering new options and features. Like Calibre, it gets better with time (and no, they don't pay me for advertising
).