>Should get through quite a few of them. Alternatively, your friend could buy a sizeable drive (I have about 2,500 tracks on about 12Gb) and copy all CDs to hard drive and install WinAmp to play them. Could even then have a database with an app to link to the file and play it?

Not practical, we're looking at in excess of 2500 CDs, LPs, singles & tapes to be catalogued, so in excess of 25,000 tracks. I dont think I could go along to him with a straight face & say the easy way is going to be to buy another computer with around 120Gb disc space + the extra for the database, oh & by the way you're still going to have to type all the details in after spending 10 solid weeks without sleep copying everything to the computer & then you can automatically download the information AND every new CD you buy you'll have to do the same.

Please can I assume you were joking ?

As Len mentioned, Nero & EasyCD have the ability to write & read CD-Text, is this because they have low-level access to the CD drives or is there a library or ActiveX control that gives the same functionality ?