CLZ Music, CD/vinyl collection

Review by eFreeware

The most distinctive thing about CLZ Music is how little typing it asks of you. The app is built around barcode scanning: point the camera at the back of a CD or record sleeve and the album's details, song list and cover art are pulled in automatically. For anyone with shelves of physical music, that is the difference between a cataloging project that gets finished and one that stalls after the first twenty discs.

It is a subscription app rather than a one-off purchase, which shapes who it suits. If you own a modest collection and just want a quick inventory, the ongoing cost may be hard to justify. If you have hundreds of CDs and records and want them documented properly, with an online backup, the pitch makes more sense.

I'd expect this to appeal most to collectors who already think of their shelves as something worth organizing, and to people who have inherited or bought a large lot of records and need to know what they actually own.

Three ways to get an album into the database

The camera scanner is the headline method, and the developer bills it as having a 95% success rate. The other two routes cover the cases where a barcode is missing or unreadable: you can search by artist and title, or by catalog number. That last option is the one I find most interesting, because catalog numbers are how a lot of vinyl is identified, and the developer notes it works well for finding Discogs entries.

Discogs and the CLZ Core music database supply the album details. Between the two, the app fills in artist, title, label, release dates, genres and track lists, along with cover art, so a scanned record arrives as a fairly complete entry rather than a bare name.

What I like about having three entry points is the flexibility they give you. You can fall back to a text search and keep going.

Editing what the databases give you

You can also replace the cover art with your own images, front and back, which matters if you own a pressing whose sleeve the database does not match.

Beyond the album facts, there are personal fields for the things a collector actually tracks: condition, where the item is stored, when and where it was bought, what it cost, and free-form notes. If none of the built-in fields fits, you can create Custom Fields of your own.

That combination is what turns the app from a lookup tool into a record of your own collection. The database tells you what the album is; your entries tell you what your copy is like and where it lives.

Separate collections and flexible browsing

You are not limited to one list. Multiple collections appear as Excel-like tabs along the bottom of the screen, and the developer suggests using them to keep different people's music apart, to separate physical discs from digital files, or to track items you have sold or have up for sale. I can see the appeal of that last use: a sold pile and an owned pile are genuinely different things, and mixing them would make the inventory misleading.

Browsing is configurable. Albums can be shown either as compact rows with small images or as bigger picture cards, sorted by artist, title, release date, length or date added, and filed into folders by author, composer, format, label, genre or location.

The grouping options are where the app earns its keep for larger collections. Being able to sort by location, for instance, is the sort of thing that helps when you are trying to work out which box a record ended up in.

Cloud backup and viewing your library elsewhere

The CLZ Cloud service does three jobs. It keeps an online backup of your music database, it syncs the library between multiple devices, and it lets you view and share your collection online. For anyone who has spent an evening entering records by hand, the backup alone is a reasonable argument for using it.

Sharing is the part with the widest range of uses. A shared view of what you own can be handy when someone asks what you have.

The developer describes support as available seven days a week through a contact option in the menu and a user forum, and the company has been making collection database software since 1996.

What the subscription costs

The download is free and ad-free, but continued use needs a subscription: $1.99 monthly or $19.99 yearly. There is a free seven-day trial that covers all of the app's features and online services, which is enough time to scan a shelf or two and decide whether the workflow suits you.

I would treat it as a working test rather than a browse. Enter a representative slice of your collection, including a few awkward items, and see how the scanning and the fallback searches work for you.

Collectors with libraries in the thousands are the audience here, and at that scale a yearly fee works out to very little per record.

How it compares with other ways of keeping track

The obvious alternative is a spreadsheet. You type everything yourself, and cover art and track lists have to be entered by hand or left out. For a small collection that is fine; for a large one it becomes a chore that never quite gets done.

A second option is a general note-taking or database app, which is flexible. The scanning shortcut disappears.

CLZ Music is built for the physical shelf, and it is the automatic lookup and the cloud backup that separate it from doing the job manually.

A cataloging tool for people with shelves to document

CLZ Music is a narrow app that does one job thoroughly. It catalogs CDs and vinyl records, fills in the details from online databases, lets you correct and extend everything, and keeps a synced copy in the cloud. The 4.6 average from more than 3,700 ratings and the 100,000-plus installs suggest a lot of collectors have found it useful since it first appeared in December 2010.

The subscription is the main thing to weigh. At $19.99 a year it is not a casual download, and the seven-day trial is the sensible way to find out whether it is worth it for your own collection.

If you have a large physical music collection and want it documented, searchable and backed up, this is a well-established option. If your music lives mostly in files and streams, the app's focus is on discs and sleeves.

What's new in version 11.2.4

New: * Edit > Images tab: Added buttons to directly take a picture or pick an image from camera roll Fixed for Images tab on Edit screen: * Pick Image: Accessing other image sources wasn't possible