KDS CD/DVD Organizer

[Whizbang]

I had wondered for several years how good the KDS organizer was.  I waited until I found a new one on Ebay that I was able to purchase new for $21.00 + S&H.  I am definitely glad I did not get one when the going price was up to $179.00.  The USB 1.0 compliance makes XP 2.0 compliance too fast for it, and the last available update for the tower setup does not work--->period.  Fortunately, I was aware of the problem before I made the purchase and found a driver that does work, if watching a snail crawl can be considered OK.  The software is very slow, if barely tolerable.  The system will many times not recognize that a disk is in one of the trays and will grey out that tray and turn off the LED to that location.  That is nothing major, just an annoyance.  The trays are super-flimsy genuine plastic and would take no abuse at all, but that is also the case for most printer trays at almost any price.  I have found no way yet in the software program to alphabetize the entries, but I am still looking.  That could be a bad annoyance, since any deletion or addition would require rearranging the whole stack each time to get an ordered listing, not acceptable at all.  The cabinet is also too tall to fit in a computer tower space and really would require special placement.  Since the purchase, I have seen several manual racks that are more practical, but they also have no system for alphabetizing either.  If I can come up with a good database remedy, this may yet be a half-way good idea.  The one major concern I had from the outset was that the top slot had a piece of junk metal stuck in the tray.  At first I thought it was a special sensor or tray identifier, but after seeing how crude it was, even with its special sticky back, I removed it only to find that it was indeed a piece of metal trash with a sticky back.  Maybe that is why KDS has cut back their US and Canadian support centers.  Conclusions and inferences are left to the reader.

[Whizbang]

Although sorting the database does not seem to be an option, I discovered that the program does copy the file names for storage if you allow the program to scan the disks through the computer's CD/DVD drives.  That would save a lot of time trying to find lost files that were stored somewhere on some forgotten disk.

Now that I have learned this bit of good news, I need to go back to find which disks I simply added to database with the manual entry option to see if using the Autoscan feature would have merit by including files and sub-files in the database.

[Whizbang]

Typing in the first few letters of a CD or file in a search will let you know which slot contains the needed CD or information.  That is good news, since there is no alphabetizing of the list.  I do hope this baby will last awhile because parts are virtually non-existent.