I <3 CDs. I might be a member of the iPod generation, but I still think there’s something wonderfully visceral about playing a physical piece of media. I love watching a record spin on a turntable and would love to be a complete vinyl convert, but I just don’t have the space or patience to maintain a record collection.
CDs are great–the problem is with the jewel cases they’re stored in.
They break, easily
A sign of how loved a CD is, is whether the case is broken. There are four sad sad places a jewel case might break, and especially considering that jewel cases are getting flimsier (anecdotal observation from my shopping for used CDs–the older CDs had more durable jewel cases), keeping cases in good condition is a losing proposition.
They’re bulky
Having a decent collection of CDs takes up a lot of premium bookshelf space. Even clever solutions like this can’t hide that a lot of space is needed to store CDs in their jewel cases.
I’ve stacked five jewel cases and their corresponding CDs and liner notes next to each other. The actual content (CDs and liner notes) take up maybe half the space the jewel cases do. A jewel case is about .4 inches wide, so you can fit maybe 30 CDs in 1 foot of space if you arrange them like you do books–standing up and in a row. This can be a problem especially if you’re using a regular bookshelf–there’s probably a lot of space behind each CD that you don’t have ready access to. I also don’t like the alternative.
Stacking CDs flat is one solution, but it makes random access to a particular CD less than optimal. To make a CS analogy, although stacking CDs would be more efficient in space, it creates a Last In First Out scenario where all the best CDs are at the top and where all the less-listened-to CDs are at the bottom. Everything but the top CDs are harder to access. To me, this is not an optimal solution since one of the points of having a sizable CD collection is rediscovering music while browsing. This Stack structure would discourage that. The traditional way, is more appealing to me since you can randomly access any of the CDs easily.
Storing CDs in their original jewel is inefficient. There are a few other CD organization strategies, including CD books, slim cases, and sleeves. I cleaned up my CD collection over the summer and am pretty happy with the results–the only thing is that I had to use several resources to compile the necessary information to do so. I thought it might be nice to organize the information that I found in a series of posts.
Tags: cds, organizing
I have adopted a rather complex set of solutions to the problems you dscribe.
I store my CDs standing up like boooks but pushed to the back of the shelves. This way the jewel case can remain in the correct position just pulled forwards whilst the CD is being played. BUT what is the correct position?
I have long stored my music (since LPs) alphabetically byartist surname or group name and within an artist chronologically by album. A few years ago I converted all my CDs to mp3 format and have these filed in folders “\CDs\\\”. My mp3 tags are a real mess due to my having accepted whatever CDDB had assigned.
Now I have not managed to organise the mp3s in the same order as I used to keep the physical CDs and last year I took a step I now regret. I reorganised the CDs into the mp3 order. I did this by writing a small script which printed out a list of the mp3 filenames including directory names in alphabetic order and using this to reorder the CD cases. The end result is I have a set of CDs that are not in a natural order as far as my mind is concerned and I have a whole shelf of “The …” CDs.
A partial solution to this is that I have installed the Simese streaming media server on my PC and I connect to this using a Pinnacle ShowCenter (a dumb web client with a lot of nice audio and video outputs). I can now search through my CD collection and select tracks to form a playlist and listen to them via my TV surround sound and HiFi system.
I can of course still enjoy the pleasure of handling the physical media although with age my eyesight is making locating the CD I want harder.
Regards
Steve