Who we are

  We started back in late 2003 as a group of guys connected by common interests in fields of discovering new music and keeping track of our personal music catalogs. As music industry seems a bit shaky, producing higher amounts of one day wonders, we as music lovers are hungry for new high quality stuff. Good music deserves a lot of exploration and the latter consumes time. Using out technical background we decided to create our own system dedicated to music collectors, that would allow to keep your library really efficiently, also simplifying several processes to save time. Initially serving primarily our own needs, later on the project grew up to the point where it made sense to present it to the public. And this is what you see on the site.

FAQ

What is Antennaria?

  Antennaria is a complex of software solutions aimed at keeping, organizing and interacting with music libraries. Whereas popular packages like iTunes or Winamp provide basic functionality for small and medium sized libraries, market of huge libraries is well underserved. We at Antennaria understand that music fans with non-standard sizes of their collections might have some specific requirements for sorting, analisys and playback and we used our social and technical experience to come up with a framework reflecting many's ambitions.

Structure of Antennaria

  In our opinion, no out of box software can cover all your music collector's needs, even in time of MP3 which seriously simplified organisation and standartization. Antennaria is a set of various tools and utilities, each of those serves its own purpose. Primary and major instrument is Antennaria.Local, Windows-based application that collects, keeps and handles information about your music library. It is also capable of creating complex playlists based on a multitude of criteria. The site you're reading is Antennaria.FrontEnd, a web application that represents music libraries and their parts in variety of forms. These two parts are connected and are served by several smaller tools and utilities.

Comparison with publicly available software

  We agree that for majority of music fans there is no sense in going beyond iTunes or Winamp Music Library, these are well-respected and supported programs that give you great interface and perfomance. The problem occurs when library grows over some level (some people complain they have problems with iTunes importing over 200 GBytes of music files even on faster computers). In this case even such a simple procedure as alphabetical sorting may take minutes and lead to pitiful consequences in terms of user experience. We believe that organizing such a big collection of music should be record-based (or album-based, if you will) as opposed to track-based. Which means that your primary item of search results should always be album, of course with tracks belonging to it.

Why do you say album is an elementary item in your catalog?

  This is in fact the way people collected music before aforementioned software packages came to scene — collecting pop/rock music or classical music was always about albums that one had on shelves. Record is a logical conclusion of an musician's work and songs on it very often share some common idea. It is also a natural group to combine songs by.

So do you have songs at all in your catalogs?

  Yes, we certanly do. Each album in our system consists of songs that are selectable.

Very interesting, I was thinking about doing something similar and I've got some ideas

  Then you should contact us. We truly value similar-minded people and it'll be good if we can at least chat on the phone or on the net.

Can I also have an account on your server?

  It doesn't make much sense to have an account here unless you've got some music data inserted in your Antennaria.Local. Based on our experience, it's possible to add from one to several hundred records to the database daily, depending on how many details you're planning to add together with those albums. Let us know if you would like to give Antennaria a try.

While the idea is good, I see it's far from complete and I'd better wait before creating my profile here.

  This site is a neverending project, it has been in the works for much time and we still have hundreds of ideas to be implemented. It's been developed steadily, some ideas we like and some get removed shortly after publishing, but the point is - there will be no "complete" phase here, it'll go along with development of technology, other web services and of course music material.

What are the details, tags and other criteria that can be applied to each record?

  You can see them in our databases: genres (unlimited for each record), release labels, regions of the world with which this record is associated, archive storage media this record is backed up to and some other.

Do you provide a static set of tags or can I come up with my own?

  Antennaria has a pre-defined set of fields (label, genre etc.), values of those fields ("Mute Records", "disco", "Music For The Masses" etc.) are totally up to you.

I don't want to expose all my music collection to public eye, some might think it's all mp3 and I'm a pirate.

  On public Antennaria pages there is no information about physical or electronic nature of music material you've got. Antennaria.FrontEnd only displays structure of your library and cross-links between its parts, completely disregardless of albums being CD, mp3 or tapes.

You're listening to so terrible music, can I trust people with such a bad taste? Besides, you're being so wrong underrating my favorite album!

  If we did so, we encourage you to join us and publish your musical catalog thus moving an average rate for that album up. And yes, we listen to a very broad range of music — if we didn't, we wouldn't even be here.

What type of hardware do I need for Antennaria?

  If you're just a visitor, all you need is a web browser preferably with Flash plugin. If you plan to establish yourself on Antennaria, any decent Windows box will be enough.

I want to use some of your materials/functionality/reviews on my site, is it OK with you?

  We'd appreciate if you could put a link to our site.

Can I download mp3 from here?

  No, you can't.

Do you sell music in any way?

  We do not distribute music, commercially or not.

But you've got this album/song I've been searching for years! I need to have it, how can I get it?.

  We're afraid it is not technically possible to fulfill all such requests. If you've tried all regular ways like Google, Amazon et cetera and you're positive it's an emergency case, contact us.

How often do you refresh the site? If there anywhere I can read about updates?

  If you're interested in updates of catalogs, you can subscribe to RSS feeds. We also publish notes related to overall site functionality in our blog.