Free Music Catalog Software for Indexing Your Songs

Create a searchable music database so you can quickly find songs

By
Mark Harris
Mark Harris
Writer
  • University of Wolverhampton
Mark Harris is a former writer for Lifewire who wrote about the digital music scene and streaming music services in an easy to understand, no-nonsense manner.
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Updated on April 28, 2020
CD with Mac Laptop

Gio Barto / Photographer's Choice / Getty Images

If you archive your digital music to CD, DVD, or other types of storage, then it can be really frustrating trying to find a particular song. Even though software media players make it easy to locate songs within a scanned library, they often do not cover archived music found in various locations.

Fortunately, there are cataloging software tools you can use to quickly build up a searchable database. The following free software programs have been selected for their use in archived digital music collections, but can also be used for other types of media.

01
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Visual CD

Visual CD has some great facilities for cataloging all kinds of media files. This free software program for Windows can index information from ID3 tags, video and image metadata, and filename and date information. Visual CD can also look inside popular archive formats (Zip, Rar, 7-zip, Cab).

It even includes a playlist generator that negates the need to have any music files already on your hard disk. This can save heaps of time when your media files may be hidden away in an archive file. Other useful tools include duplicate files finder, advanced renaming, and file splitting.

Overall, Visual CD is a feature-rich cataloging program that works well with different types of media files.

02
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Data Crow

Data Crow is programmed in Java and works on most operating systems—Java 1.6 or higher. This media cataloger is different from others in this list because it's module-based and therefore more structured. To catalog your audio CD albums, for example, you need to choose the Audio CDs module to automatically fill in all the information about the album using online resources.

Similarly, to index your files, you need to select the Music Albums module and click on the File Import icon in the toolbar to index and automatically tag your digital music files. Data Crow is a full-featured application with many configurable options for building huge databases for practically any media type.

03
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Disclib

This is a program for the Windows platform that catalogs your CD collection. Disclib preserves the directory structure of CDs by cataloging their file and folder names. You can then use Disclib to search and browse your CD collection without having to physically insert them. The program can also extract MP3 tag information, which is useful for finding a particular artist, song, or genre.

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