MusicBuddy: Vinyl & CD Tracker

After many disappointing trials of other apps for maintaining a list of my music library, I am so happy to have found Music Buddy Pro. It does a great job of finding music from the barcodes and most importantly in enables my wife and I to share the same database so each of us can add CDs when we buy them. We both have ADHD so we’ve frequently bought a duplicate of an album we already had. This app is easy to add at time of purchase and syncs right up on the spouses phone. We used to call the dupes, paying our ASHD tax. With music buddy we no longer have that stress in our lives. There are so many more features but no extra feature would make up for missing the basics and this app does the basic brilliantly.

inevitably where there's an update, one of my systems will return “sync disabled”, requiring me to re-enable it and then wait for my library to sync again. quite frustrating. at the very least, it could remember which service i had selected previously instead of forcing me to choose one again. also, a proper Mac version would also be welcome, rather than the iPad app running in Mac OS. definitely works and is better than nothing, but having a proper Mac UI would be a delight. it's also frustrating when it comes to adding albums. about 5% of the time, an album won't be in whatever database Music Buddy uses, even fairly common stuff. it happens often enough to be a pain. it'd be great if we could then submit albums we enter manually to that database to help others avoid the same issue. and entering albums manually could be expedited if there was a native Mac version. just a thought. but it's relatively straightforward to use, if a bit clunky here and there, and has helped me avoid buying dupes more than once.

There are prettier apps out there which display your album/cd art to better advantage. This app lacks the beauty and display capabilities of some of those apps. Where it really shines is the level of data that is tracked and the ability to display it by numerous attributes like composer, orchestra, artist, conductor. If this app added some of the more elegant display settings and themes like CLZ music for instance, it would be the hands down winner. I love CLZ for is beautiful graphical display and themes but as far as tracking data elements, sorting, filtering, it can’t compare with Music Buddy and it costs 3x more. It doesn’t let you add your own categories. CLZ doesn’t even track composer or orchestra, instead focusing on artist only which is less helpful. I cannot for instance see at a glance which cds I have that are composed by Haydn or Mozart. In CLZ I would have to enter composer for each cd manually. In music buddy the cover art is really small, so an option to display it larger or a different theme without media art blended in would be nice. I don’t need to see a cd on each one, since I only have cds. The look is a bit dated. I like the ability to store notes as well for each album/cd.