Д.Д.

When you want to input a box set in Collectorz and the "Add Albums" search returns multiple individual discs you can click-select all the relevant ones and then click on "add as multi-disc album". There might be some hick-ups with just-released (or very obscure) items that might be not (yet) present in the Collectorz Core database. In general, from my experience, Collectorz can definitely beat Excel (which I know very well - and love) in terms of speed of music data entry.

I wonder how American tourists will cope... They will use Mosaic sets for barter.

Both CC and PayPal balance are essentially bank accounts . Are PayPal transfers free in the US? Well, Sweden is expected to go completely cashless very soon, and the Netherlands are probably not far behind.

Hans, not exactly. The intra-community euro transfers cannot be be more expensive than domestic transfers. Domestic transfers used to be free, but over the last three-four years the banks in many countries have started introducing per-transaction fees (often hidden in cumulative quarterly payments). And the banks have more leeway to charge corporate accounts per transaction. In any case, these are small amounts. No, it brings your respective bank accounts together. Ha-ha, yes, very true. Americans are very sensitive about their social security numbers, so this might have spilled over to bank account numbers too. I like PayPal too, I have been using it since 2000. But it's been 20 years now, there are multiple better and / or cheaper ways to pay these days. Yes, this I understood. But why? Is it complicated / expensive / cumbersome? One reasons why I am asking is that I sell stuff on Discogs occasionally, and I have the prices listed in euro. I offer the American buyers to pay in USD at interbank exchange rate (i.e. good rate) to my American bank account (set up through Transferwise - which is, as far as I am concerned, the best cross-currency payment solution today) - and they would invariably choose to pay in euro through PayPal loosing money on PayPal's screw-up exchange rate. I understand there is PayPal's seller protection aspect to it, but perhaps there are other reasons why bank transfers are not an option for Americans.

I am curios about why Americans chose PayPal for internal US transactions. In euro zone people would normally do an IBAN bank transfer. Your counter-party gives you their bank account number (which is safe, you can't really commit fraud with knowing just somebody's bank account number) and you make a transfer using your online banking. Depending on your bank it's either free or negligibly cheap. Your counter-party gets the money within 24 hours. Yes, it's not immediate, but I do not remember a transaction where somebody would not be willing to wait 24 hours, and it is much cheaper than PayPal (unless you use a free "Friends & Family" option). Is making a bank transfer more complicated than that in the US? Regarding checks, I lived in the US 20 years ago and I was bemused when I opened a bank account and received a check book. I thought this was a quaint XIX century custom, and I was pretty sure I would never have to use it. Boy, was I wrong. Most of the transactions turned out to be "check or chase only please". In general, US seemed to be quite a bit behind Europe (not to mention Japan or Korea!) technology-wise. At least that was the case 20 years ago.

I am not implying that he's not. It's just that it is one guy for whom his software is merely a hobby that does not generate revenue. This is not a very sustainable proposition long-term.

My concern with freeware is that it might not be there long-term. With paid subscription-based services you have a bit more sustainability (nothing is ever guaranteed, of course). There is a (small) team of dedicated developers who work on Collectorz full time. They are providing regular software updates (already seven in 2020) and the solution has changed dramatically over the last few years.

I never heard the Graupner / Stockhausen connection, but both of these albums are very nice (although Stockhausen's suffers from mediocre sound).

The paid one. I think the free version is a full-functionality one, just limited to number of entries. Yes, it will not always load the exact version of your CD. Or it might not have your CD in their database at all. They are now loading initial data from Discogs (it used to be other sources), so if the catalog number or the bar code you enter matches the Discogs data it would load the basic data (not credits) from the specific Discogs entry. If you add new album with just artist and title it will give you multiple versions of the album to choose from. I asked them to automatically add a Discogs link to every newly-added album, they said "they would think about it". You can read the CD itself - you would then have the tracks' length.

I've been using Music Collectorz for 15 years now, and can recommend it - with some reservations. There are some unfortunate quirks - e.g. when loading new albums multiple artists are loaded as one single artist. You have to correct this manually. This is not a big deal, but it is annoying. You can enter credits (e.g. "musicians", recording dates, studio information, composers, whatever) - down to a track level (i.e. each track can have different credits) but not all of them will be be displayed. Only the "album-level" credits are (with few exceptions), the rest might stay "under the hood" (depending on the interface you use). Track-level credits are still searchable, though. I will actually ask them to consider adding view-able track-level musician credits. Another annoying idiosyncrasy is album recording date. You can enter only one date per album. Again, if you really want to you can enter individual recording date for every track but you still have to enter some - one only - value on the album level. I have a little workaround where can enter a range (e.g. "1961-63") and this will be recognized for sorting purposes, but it is not ideal. But otherwise, it's still probably the best option available. There are many sorting options, entry is flexible, you can make linkes to your files, adding new images works well, etc. The support team is excellent and is responding very fast. Some of my change requests were implemented over the years.

Yes, this one is really good. The whole series was great.

Got this one used. Henderson is indeed excellent here, I wish Brecker was a bit more restrained on a couple of tunes, but overall it's a really good one, thanks for the recommendation.

Very interesting. American citizenship - is it to secure funding? Or was it for the British musicians' union?

GBP 4K in 1969 is equal to GBP 56K (USD 72K, EUR 65K) today.

very good