Now live: Better Discogs searching

Great news for vinyl collectors: our web-developers Joe and Robbert have revised and improved our Discogs search mechanisms, to give you more up-to-date Discogs data and more images.

What’s new in Music Collector’s Discogs support?

1. Earlier monthly updates of our Discogs mirror
   As you may know, we run our own mirror of the Discogs database (for performance reasons), which is updated monthly with their monthly full database dump.
   We have now optimized the import tool that we use for this, meaning that we can now have our mirror updated the day after Discogs releases their dump (around the 5th of the month).
2. Now search Discogs LIVE by Catalog Nr
   Did you purchase a new album that is on Discogs, but not in our mirror yet? Then in the Add Auto screen, just search by Catalog Nr. This will make our search engine check our mirror first, then if it’s not found, it will search the live Discogs database through their API. Of course, the retrieved entries are then added to our mirror.
3. All Discogs entries are now updated weekly
   For all entries that *are* in our mirror, our search engine now checks for updates once a week. Making sure you always get the freshest Discogs data and images.

4. Discogs cover images are now downloaded again!
   The downloading of Discogs images had been disabled for quite a while, because their servers couldn’t copy with the load, causing time-out errors. But it seems they have upgraded their servers, so we have enabled the cover image downloading again.
   And: to keep the load on Discogs servers as low as possible we are caching the images on our own server, giving you faster image downloads for popular albums.

IMPORTANT:
These changes are all server-side, no update of your Music Collector software needed. You don’t even need the latest version to benefit from these improvements, any old version will do 🙂