I’ve always been obsessed with liner notes. It goes all the way back to my very first LP with Lionel Richie in 1983 (Can’t Slow Down), when I became acquainted with the likes of Greg Phillinganes, David Cochrane and Paulinho Da Costa for the first time - musicians almost no one has ever heard of, but who everyone’s no doubt encountered on the radio at some point - behind the likes of Richie, McCartney or Celine Dion.

Some people have this inclination, and there’s nothing to be done about it, really. It’s a reflex, the first thing I do when I get a new CD is sit down and read the liner notes - very thoroughly - more thorough than you can imagine, probably. Some people would say I have a problem.

Anyways, I’ve always tried to organize this enormous amount of information about dorophone players, whistlers and Synclavier programmers in a thoroughly relational manner on my computer - and I’m never satisfied.

I hope all that will change now - I just purchased a cataloging program that appears to be really promising - I’m very optimistic. It’s called CATTraxx and it certainly seems to cover all bases - you can sort your information according to just about any parameter you can think of - artist, album, year, company, songwriter, lyricist… right down to the hand claps and the police whistles (Donald Fagen on “Aja”, if you were wondering.)

After doing some research on the subject, CATTraxx seems to be the most comprehensive alternative out there. It’s priced at $39.99, and I suppose that’s fairly reasonable - it appears to be a solid product. The web site is a little underwhelming, though - don’t let that fool you. You can download the software and try before you buy.

It’s easy to enter information as well, once you get the hang of it - plenty of keyboard shortcuts and logical tabs. Now, if there was only a way to transfer the 60,000+ entries from my old Access-database…hmmm