Nice Rack!

Another long hiatus since my last blog post.  Been getting stuck into organising my NAS drive with new ebook content, CBR/CBZ files, videos to stream through my iTunes and work and life in general on top of that.

Seeing as I’ve spent so much time inside ComicRack organising my digital comic collection (yeah I collect comics, big whoop!  Wanna fight about it?)

This program is fucking awesome.  As you can see from the screenshot above, I have a moderate library size and I’ve been spending time getting it organised and checking whether I’m missing any issues from all the various series’ I have. One of my favorite features is the ability to install scripts that make life so much easier.

The program is touted as the iTunes for comics.  It is.  It is feature-packed and one of the scripts organises the files similar to what you can do with iTunes by checking the option to keep the iTunes media folder organised.

My favourite script, though, is the Comic Vine Scraper – this basically pulls down all the meta data for each comic which helps in terms of keeping the library organised but also keeps your library nice and tidy looking with a synopsis of each issue.  Provided your comic file names are accurate, the scraper will prompt on the first issue to choose the correct series and all further files in the series will automatically be scraped as long as the titles are easy for it to grab the data.

In my case, a lot of my  files have a very basic file name structure so I’ve had to spend an insane amount of hours manually selecting the correct titles on Comic Vine to populate my issues’ info correctly.  Laborious task, but for anal retentive file organisational freak it’s a masochistic haven.

Another great feature is online sharing.  You can share your library over the interwebs publicly or privately – I haven’t tested this yet but I have set my library to be shared privately.

In addition to the wealth of features(a lot of which I haven’t even had a chance to try out yet), cYo (the creator of ComicRack) is also looking to design and release an app for Android for this.  Hopefully it won’t just be an app that can run on a tab as this would be the best CBR app for Android ever going by the standards of ComicRack itself.

ComicRack is available for Windows for free and the scripts are also available to download from the ComicRack homepage.

If you’re a comic fan and have or are looking to maintain a digital library and you haven’t got this – go get it. Now.

EDIT: I’ve uploaded a quick video to Youtube with a brief run through of using the scraper.