Tips & Tricks for working with CDpedia

Contextual menus (menus that appear when you ctrl-click or right-click on a certain space in the program) often save you time and sometimes reveal commands that aren't found elsewhere so it's always a good idea to check out what they have to offer.

CDpedia offers several different contextual menus depending on where you ctrl-click but specifically in the image well, the list/grid view and the details view the contextual menus offer some commands that are only available there.

The contextual menu for the image well gives you the option to download a cover image for the selected entry (Download from >) or search Google Images for a cover (Open Google Images).

The contextual menu for the list/grid view lets you find an entry in a different collection (Show in Collection >) without having to search for it.

In the details view you can access the internal web browser (Go to Site) which in turn reveals another contextual menu where you can directly add cover images, links and summaries by selecting and ctrl-clicking certains parts of a webpage.



If you've moved your iTunes Music folder to an external hard drive or have two folders on your Mac and CDpedia isn't picking up the information from the one you want to use, enter the following into the application Terminal, found in Applications/Utilities, followed by a return:

defaults write com.bruji.cdpedia "iTunes Library XML" "xxx"

(Where xxx stands for the path to your iTunes Music XML file, for example: /Users/[User name]/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library.xml)



If you'd like to set VLC as your default movie player in CDpedia, open the application Terminal found in Applications/Utilities and type in the line below, followed by a return:

defaults write com.bruji.cdpedia "VLC for VIDEO_TS" -bool YES



By default, CDpedia creates an automatic backup of its data file (Database.cdpd) once a month. These backup files are saved in your CDpedia data folder, by default located in your Home folder under ~/Library/Application Support/CDpedia. The backup files are called backup1Month.cdpd, backup2Months.cdpd and backup3Months.cdpd. After three months, the first file gets overwritten with the 4th month backup so you should always have three backup files in your CDpedia data folder.
If you make regular backups of your data already and would prefer that CDpedia didn't make these automatic backups, open the application Terminal found in Applications/Utilities and type in the line below, followed by a return:

defaults write com.bruji.cdpedia NoAutomaticBackup -bool YES



By default, the compression for all cover images is set to 0.9. If you would like to lower this setting to save space, open the application Terminal found in Applications/Utilities and type in the line below, followed by a return (and replace the [integer] part for whatever 0.x integer you want to lower it to):

defaults write com.bruji.cdpedia "JPEGCompression" -float [integer]


IF you enable this function then the title, artist and release date all have to match in order for the program to list the entries as duplicates. To turn it on, open the application Terminal found in Applications/Utilities and type in the line below, followed by a return: defaults write com.bruji.cdpedia "Strict Duplicate Match" -bool YES