If the program you use now can export your collection as a CSV file, Music Tracker can import it, whatever program it is and whatever language it writes in. You tell Music Tracker which column holds what, once, and it does the rest.

Export your collection as a CSV file

• Open the program you use now.
• Find its export command. It is usually under File, Tools, Settings or Backup.
• Choose CSV. If it offers a choice of which columns to export, choose all of them: a column you leave out cannot be imported later.
• Save the file somewhere your device can reach it, such as iCloud Drive or Dropbox.

Some programs write one file per kind of record, so you may end up with one for CDs, one for LPs and one for cassettes. Import them one after another. Music Tracker recognizes the records it has already imported, so nothing is doubled.

If your program cannot export a CSV file at all, look in its own help for a backup or a report that can be opened in a spreadsheet and saved as CSV.

Import the file into Music Tracker

• Open Music Tracker and go to Settings, then Import.
• Choose your file.
• Music Tracker looks at the column names. If it does not recognize the program, it says so and asks. Tap Another App.
• Tap Continue.

Say what is in your file

You now see a list of the things a record can have, and under each one, the column Music Tracker thinks holds it, with a line taken from your own file as an example. That example is the point: you do not need to know what a column is called in a language you do not read, because underneath it you can see the titles of your own records.

The list is divided into three parts:

The Record: the title, the artists, the type, the year, the label, the barcode, the genres.

Yours: your rating, your tags, your notes.

Your Copy: the day you bought it, what you paid, where you keep it, and the day it went into your old library.

• If something is matched to the wrong column, tap it and choose the right one.
• If your file has nothing for it, choose Not in This File.
• A column can only fill one thing. Giving it to something else takes it away from where it was.

Only one thing is required: the title. Nothing can be imported without it, and the row that needs doing says so on itself.

Look at what will happen before it happens

Music Tracker reads the file and checks it against the records you already have. Then it shows you what it is about to do, before anything is written:

• All, everything the file holds.
• Importing, what will be added.
• Skipped, what will not be, including the rows that could not be read at all.
• Needs a look, the rows Music Tracker has something to say about.

Tap any row to take it out of the import or put it back. A record you already have is left alone by default, and its row says what it was recognized by, so you can disagree.

When a record is already in your library and you want it imported anyway, you have three choices, and each of them is a whole outcome:

• Fill in what is missing: only the empty details are filled in. Nothing you have written changes.
• Use the file: where the file has something, it replaces what you have. A column the file leaves empty changes nothing, because an absence is not a correction.
• Add as a second copy: you end up with two of that record, which is right when you own two.

You can apply any of the three to everything on screen at once.

What could not be read

Rows that could not become records are listed with the line of the file they were on, the column, and the value that was in it, so you can open the file and see for yourself. The commonest reasons are a row with no title, an empty row, and a code a spreadsheet turned into something like 5,09975E+12, which is what happens to a barcode when a spreadsheet decides it is a number.

About barcodes

A barcode is what lets Music Tracker recognize a record you already have. It reads the ones that are real: eight, twelve, thirteen or fourteen digits, with the last digit checking the others. A UPC of twelve digits and an EAN of thirteen are the same code written two ways, and Music Tracker treats them as the same record.

Anything else in that column is kept, but as a plain code rather than a barcode, because it is not one. Catalog numbers and numbers stamped in the runout groove end up there, and that is where they belong.

Records made before about 1979 have no barcode at all. Barcodes reached music at the end of the seventies and were not usual until the middle eighties, so an older record is recognized by its title and its artist, which suggests rather than settles: Music Tracker imports it and tells you what it looks like, and you decide.

That is it. Your collection is now in Music Tracker.