There's pro's and cons to both Basehead and Soundminer HD, so why don't you try out the demo's for both of them and see which one you like best? I personally like Soundminer HD a bit better for how it groups and organises search results, but like you pointed out it's more expensive and you have to pay double to go cross-platform. I only tried the Basehead demo for a couple of weeks about a year ago, and it's certainly a good program, and lots of people swear by it. I think I got confused by how it wouldn't smoothly let me search by categories or library names, but maybe I was just being an idiot or it has been improved since. Try it out for yourself!

Well one of the features of Basehead http://www.baseheadinc.com/products/basehead-mac/feature-overview is that it actually improves your sex life. I'm not sure how other products compete with that but its definitely worth checkin in to.

Personally I've been a big fan of Soundminer - used it since v3 and always have liked it. Although it is worth bearing in mind that the price of HD/HD+ versus the older versions is dramatically cheaper (read: $600-700 for SMXP and $800 for SMv4 Standard) so I think the price point difference is somewhat negligible nowadays since HD/HD+ have almost all features that SMv4 Standard and SMXP have at half the price (right now the only two major outstanding features are the Admin panel and playlisting a la v4 stye).

For my the choice is uniformity and I like how it works in my workflow. Everyone I've worked with uses Soundminer, so I like having the comfort in knowing embedded metadata will populate on pretty much any system I have to work on (especially when custom FX are traded for work purposes like FX pulls - it's nice to receive those files and have per-prepared SM metadata). And I'm just used to how the tools work and the way the Boolean searches work within Soundminer. I guess it's a personal taste in the choice and when I saw Baseheads layout a while back it's design looked clunky and wasn't pleasing on my eyes (I know, somewhat superfluous, but when you have to stare at a certain piece of software for many hours of the day, I like to choose something that's comfortable for my eyes).

I havent used basehead for several years because Nuendo's built in search is fine. Before that I was a basehead fan (for a while steve was using a quote from me on his site). I used it for years. I have spent very little time on sound miner, so I cant speak to it.

FOr a search and retrieval system basehead was awesome. I know some people like to do fancy things with their search engine (like applying fx and pitching). That's not how i work. Basehead was great, and support was great as well.

dr

+1 for AudioFinder, that's what we use in our facility.