I've been using Collectorz Music Collector software for almost three years now and generally I love it.

Recently I bought a laptop, so I'm now free to perform my obsessive cataloguing anywhere I like. However, because adding CDs to Music Collector is best done by putting the CD in the CD drive, and because I like to rip my music at the same time as adding it to the database, it still makes sense to leave the Music Collector software on my desktop.

I have been wishing though that I could somehow use my laptop for the checking and minor fixing textual work, and leave the desktop as the main database, somehow syncing the two.

After reading FAQs and the licence instructions I discovered such a thing was possible.

With my Pro licence, I get a free (if limited) Connect account. Connect is the online version of the Music Collector software. With this account it is possible to Upload/Download changes to my database between computers.

Important links:

• How to Upload/Download/Sync to online account:
• Using the same Collectorz licence on two computers
• How to transfer data to another computer

Installing and licencing a copy of Music Collector on my laptop was easy enough, as was uploading my collection on my desktop, followed by downloading my collection to my laptop. I didn't copy my database from the desktop, I relied entirely on Connect sync.

I conducted my first experiment last night, making some edits to my collection (adding purchase details mostly) on my laptop, then attempting to sync back to Connect, then my desktop.

I immediately noticed a few problems which took a while to sort out:

• CD images from Connect didn't always match those on my desktop.
• Disc index (where an "album" has multiple discs) were screwed up on the laptop. Sync would see they were different on Connect and ask to download the fixes each time, but on downloading, nothing changed.
• Some of the data on my desktop doesn't seem to be included in Connect, including (not unexpectedly) the user-configured fields, but also some standard Music Collector fields. Luckily all the fields I'm interested in fixing when editing on the laptop are included.
• Because I had problems I wanted to sync only my updated CDs and skip the ones with issues. This is extremely difficult with the "updates found" screen not sortable, in a random order. You can select which CDs to sync and which not, but picking and choosing is hard without order.

After the first painful sync (where my purchase details did end up on my desktop as hoped, but only after carefully picking and choosing which CDs to sync and which to ignore) I dropped everything and copied the database directly from the desktop to the laptop, including images, following the "how to transfer" instructions above.

Having done this, problems have all gone away.

I suspect as I sync more and more updates from my desktop via Connect some problems will sneak back in, but frequent enough manual copies from the desktop should prevent this. I'm only using the laptop for editing anyway, the desktop will always be the master.

Fun times!

Shortly I'll hopefully be using the data I've been entering to analyse my purchase history in typical obsessive fashion.

Yay.