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.