Saturday, January 14, 2006

OrangeCD 5.1 Review



OrangeCD Suite 5.1
FireTongue Software
Rating: **** (4 stars/5)
PC/Windows

Anyone who tends to gather a large collection of CD’s like I do should be interested in a great shareware program from FireTongue software called OrangeCD that takes control and organizes your CD collection. Now you may be thinking, I have 500 CD’s, that’s too time consuming; the heart and soul of this program is its seamless integration with FREEDB.COM, a web service supported by users like you who want better media organization. There are many different ways to enter in music from your collection, clicking on “scan from CD ROM” will start the program scanning your CDROM drives for audio CD’s. When it finds an audio CD, the program then connects to FREEDB and collects the CD's correct information like album title, artist, track titles, times and special notes about the recording. It’s that easy!

Currently, I am using OrangeCD to catalogue my large collection of CD’s I recieve for music reviews and I have encountered very few CD’s that the program has not instantly recognized. So far, OrangeCD has saved hundreds of hours of manually entering information that sometimes can be very difficult to find and often means scouring amazon or other sites to pull information on one particular album. Some other cool features of OrangeCD is the ability to specify whether the album was a gift, how much it cost or whether it’s part of a compilation or a box set. You can also upload cover art into the database for each CD. Another nice feature of OrangeCD is its MP3 functionality. It’s not just limited to digital formats either, it will catalogue almost every media type but the auto-recognition is limited to CD’s and MP3’s only (Don’t try sticking a record or cassette tape into your CDROM drive). The program will also generate a variety of nice reports, graphs and with the included media player you can quickly preview a track, or listen while working. Simply put, this may not be the only program for cataloging media, but I have yet to find one that does it as easily as OrangeCD. Kudos to Andrei at FireTongue software for this great program!

OrangeCD Suite 5.1 is available for download as a trial version at www.firetongue.com/ and can be purchased from the company’s site for 34.95USD. Bulk orders and corporate licenses are available.

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