Basenji 0.8 (Tool To Index Your CDs/DVDs, USB Devices And Network Drives), Released

Basenji is a cross-platform tool you can use to index your CDs/DVDs and USB devices so you can later search the database without having plug the media into your computer.

Basenji is very useful for those with large movies / music collections but not only. You can also use it to easily search some backups you store on removable media or your photos, etc.

Basenji features:

• Audio CD Support
• Metadata Extraction (image dimensions or MP3 tags)
• Thumbnails
• Optional daemon that automatically scans a device you plug in and adds it to the Basenji database

Basenji 0.8 was released yesterday, getting lots of useful features. These were already available (some were already there for quite a long time actually) in the Basenji daily PPA - such as the daemon that automatically scans inserted drives, but these are finally stable enough for a wide audience. Here's the Basenji 0.8 changelog:

• Added support for network drives and mountpoints
• Added option to disable the iteminfo panel
• Added option to hide hidden files
• Added support for metadata searching
• Added debugging options
• Added daemon for automated drive scanning
• Many new translations
• Many optimizations and bugfixes

Install Basenji 0.8 in Ubuntu (stable PPA)

Add the Basenji stable PPA and install it in Ubuntu 11.04, 10.10 and 10.04 using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pulb/ppa 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install basenji

Also install the Basenji daemon using the following command (but the daemon is not available for Ubuntu 10.04!):

sudo apt-get install volumedb-tools

To learn how to use the Basenji daemon, run the following command:

volumedb-scanner-daemon --help

More about setting up the Basenji daemon @ Basenji Gets A Scanner Daemon Which Automatically Adds Inserted Volumes To The Database

Download Basenji for other Linux distributions and Windows @ Launchpad.

Basenji Helps You Keep Track Of Your CDs/DVDs And USB Sticks Data

Basenji is a tool which indexes your removable media such as CDs/DVDs and USB sticks and keeps a history of the data on each media you add to its database so you can later easily search / browse for something on your CDs/DVDs or USB sticks without actually plugging them into your computer.

Do you have a lot of audio CDs? Basenji has that covered too, along with metadata extraction (image dimensions and mp3 tags) and thumbnail support (so you can see a thumbnail for your indexed data without having the media inserted into your computer).

Further more, Basenji is crossplaform and there are binaries available already for both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu). The database can easily be exported so you can move it to a different computer and if that's too much hassle, you could always use Dropbox (or UbuntuOne) to directly synchronize the database between multiple computers. Basenji can also import Gnome Catalog databases which has ceased development.

Install Basenji in Ubuntu

To install Basenji in Ubuntu, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pulb/ppa 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install basenji

Once installed, launch Basenji via the Applications > Accessories > Basenji menu item.

The above PPA is for stable Basenji builds but if you want to run the latest daily build, there's a PPA for that too (but note that it may be unstable). You can find the Basenji daily builds PPA @ Launchpad (it's only available for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx at the time I'm writing this post).


To install Basenji on Windows, once you download the Win32 archive, see the Readme (important, as you'll have to install Gtk# for .NET).

Download Basenji portable volume indexer (Windows binaries and source files are available).

GCstar: Free, Cross-Platform Collection Manager (Movies, Books, Music and More)

GCstar is a free open source application for managing your collections which works on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Detailed information on each item can be automatically retrieved from the internet and you can store additional data, such as the location or who you've lent it to. You may also search and filter your collection by many criteria.

The current collections supported by GCStar are: movies, books, music, wine, board games, comics, numismatic (coins), TV shows (episodes) and video games but you can always create your own collection type. Also, GCstar can import collections from different collection managers such as Alexandria, Ant Movie Catalog, DVDProfiler, GCFilms, MyMovies and Tellico.

GCstar has an GTK, KDE and base skin, so it should look ok on both KDE and Gnome. It it also fully or partly translated in these languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.


To see GCstar in action, I've just recorded a small screen-cast:

Ubuntu users will find GCstar in the official repositories, but that's an older version. To install the latest version, add the following PPA:

-Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gcstar/ppa

-Older Ubuntu versions:

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gcstar/ppa/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

Replacing YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE with jaunty, intrepid or hardy.

Then, to install GCstar (for any Ubuntu version):

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install gcstar

For other Linux distributions, Windows and Mac OS X installation, see GCstar INSTALLATION page.


For a Windows-only movie / tv series cataloging application, see: Personal Video Database