Keeping it Organised

I organise my wine cellar with 'The Uncorked Cellar' wine cellar software, it's PC based (doh!) and I have yet to find a Mac cellaring program that I like. So you can run it on a Mac using Parallels Desktop or every new Mac lets you install Windows XP and Vista and run them at native speeds, using a built-in utility called Boot Camp. (info HERE)

I have an old PC Notebook which I run The Uncorked Cellar on until I find a viable Mac alternative. The Uncorked Cellar is essentially a database and wine information system.

THE INTERFACE (Click on image for a larger view)

Its great because you can see your wine ageing potential and tasting notes provided by the winemaker. This way you know when your wines will be at their very best. You can also configure a virtual rack display that looks just like your rack (or racks) which makes them easy to find. You can also view a range of graphs and reports of your wine.

2005 PENFOLDS 389 MATURITY CURVE (Click on image for a larger view)

Currently it has over 329,000 wines in the database from Australia NZ and all over the world. I have yet to fin a wine it does not recognise, but if you do you can submit it to the web site for consideration for inclusion.

ALL WINES MATURITY TIMELINE (Click on image for a larger view)

Crap in my iTunes music library

I had a heap of crap in my iTunes music library and iTunes never seems to be able to find all of the album covers. I had duplicate songs, mis-labeled albums and little genre or year data and mis labled songs all over the shop. Then I found TuneUp a piece of software for both Windows and Mac that takes the headache out of your iTunes database. It allows you to drag and drop songs and it cleans up all the details about each song and finds the album covers you are missing. If you have Shazam for the iPhone you will be familiar with the concept of a digital sample of the song (a sound fingerprint if you like) is sent to Gracenote, formerly called CDDB (Compact Disc Data Base). Their database contains information about the contents of almost every disc and vinyl record ever produced. With 2,500 tracks I went from 41% clean data to 89% with just a few scans and a little manual tweaking. TuneUp has a free version that lets you cleanup a 100 songs, so it is perfect and FREE for someone with only a few mistakes in their library. I got the paid version $20 for a years subscription and think its well worth it. :-)