Archiving to off-line media is a good idea, but it can be difficult to remember what exactly was on the media you archived to in the first place. Many disc catalogue programs will enable you to collect data about what’s on the disc, but often that data will be little more than the file names of the files and folders on that disc. DiskLibrary differs in that it will allow you to catalogue the media data itself.

DiskLibrary uses a variant of the iTunes layout. The list of media is at the left, the main window listing the contents in the middle, and the metadata and media previews at right. Media can be added one by one, or in batch. Other catalogues file formats may be imported, although I found the list of supported formats lacking the DiskCatalogMaker RE format. Even that program’s export text file can’t be imported properly into DiskLibrary, yet it’s one of the helper applications delivered with Toast, so it’s not some obscure software.

Nevertheless, DiskLibrary does support importing formats of catalogue software used by a large number of people, such as DiskTracker, CDFinder, and WhereIsIt on Windows. You can create categories in DiskLibrary that further organise your media collection in an easier way for browsing. Smart Catalogues can be created just like in the Mac OS X Finder.

Where DiskLibrary becomes less appealing in my opinion, is in the area that sets it apart. Cataloguing the media contents is a great idea, but the whole process takes much too long to be really useful. A 4.7 GB DVD took well over ten minutes before DiskLibrary finally got all content extracted, and that’s way too long. You can turn the feature off, and then DiskLibrary becomes a good disk cataloguing application, but nothing too special, although I must admit its search is very fast, and its browsing functionality the most complete I’ve seen in programs like these.

If you can live with the performance of the content scanning, then DiskLibrary can’t be beaten in terms of feature-richness and value. If you can’t, it still is among the best cataloguing software you can buy.