Linking your albums for CLZ Cloud

Linking your albums for syncing with CLZ Cloud

Before uploading your albums to CLZ Cloud from the Windows or Mac software, you can “link your albums”.

Music Collector, CLZ Cloud and Linking

Music Collector is built around our central online database: Core for Music. For the online user databases in CLZ Cloud, all factual album details (musicians, label, genre, format) and cover images are used and shown directly from Core for Music.

This factual album data is not stored per user. Instead, it is stored only once, inside Core for Music then linked to for every CLZ Cloud user that owns that album.
This factual data is not uploaded to CLZ Cloud when you sync your data from Music Collector. It only uploads your personal data fields like Collection Status, Purchase information, Notes, Rating, etc…), plus the link to the corresponding album entry in Core for Music (basically just the CLZ Music ID of the entry inside Core for Music).

How to link your albums

If you have been using the Add Albums Automatically screen to catalog your albums, selecting and downloading the data from Core for Music, then most of your albums will already be linked.

You will only need to link the albums that you added manually.

To link your albums, click menu CLZ Core > Batch Link Albums and let the program search for your albums in the Core for Music. Link whatever you can (no problem if you can’t link a couple).

You can search all of them at once, or check the results and focus on each single album before linking it.

The advantages of the Linking with Core for Music and central shared data in Core for Music

*Automatic Updates: * When our content managers or other users update the album information in Core for Music (e.g. to add a better cover image, to improve data, or to fix a typo), you will immediately see those changes in CLZ Cloud.
No need to “Update Albums Automatically”. Your collection in CLZ Cloud always automatically shows the latest version of the data and cover art.

It’s fast: Sharing the factual album data means that its retrieval can be optimized (e.g. by caching), resulting in a smooth experience when browsing your CLZ Cloud album collection. Also, syncing up from your desktop/mobile app v is very fast, because only your personal data and a single ID value needs to be uploaded to your CLZ Cloud.

It’s efficient: Shared factual album data is only stored once, which means our servers are not clogged by duplicate copies of data and images (that are all the same for every user). This also makes it possible for our systems to make daily backups of your album collection data.

What if an album is not in Core for Music?

This shouldn’t happen too often, but here’s what you can do to handle this situation and at the same time help us improve Core for Music:

Good to know: You can upload and keep unlinked albums in your CLZ Cloud. Unlinked items will show up online with just some basic information and will include your personal data, including the cover image that you may have added yourself to the unlinked album.

TIP: For albums not available in our central database, make sure to include the barcode in your unlinked entry, so that our Content Team can spot popular “un-linked” albums and add them to the central database. As soon as they do, your entry will automatically become a full entry with all album information.

Also, if you do have full information for that album you can right click it in your collection and report it to Core to add/make correction in Core for Music.