CD organization techniques?

Even though it wasn't asked, my vinyl (virtually all techno/house 12"s) is organized by label, and then by catalog number within each label. (if my grammar is bad or I am rambling, blame OUZO!)

The best organization schemes allow one with large amounts of records to rediscover that which they have forgotten.

How do you possibly remember the catalog numbers for your vinyl?

after a while, I tend to get a sense of where they belong. I have a relatively small collection (4 crates), and I don;t have more than 8 records per label. when I am practicing, I don't pull the sleeve out of the crate completrly. some labels that are run by one artist or group of artist seem to display cat #'s much more prominently. for instance, my favorite label, Combustible (best label that nobody knows for tribal tech house qurikiness) usually has something like "combustible 8" on the label, so I don't have to read the writing in the run-out grooves. I don't know if you deal with a lot of 12"s on independant labels, but the cat. no's are usually quite low, so it is not like I have to remember "Columbia 12-999453487" or some shit like that. I remember realtive position more than exact numbers.

just to reiterate "typos = ouzo" hehehe

Ron, the A-C, D-F dividers sounds like a good idea, I may investigate that.

Tantivy's desk is neat, Slothrop's is a godawful mess. It hasn't been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer's Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop's mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string, chalk . . . above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters,
tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs including "Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland" ("He does have some rather snappy arrangements," Tantivy reports, "he's a sort of American George Formby, if you can imagine such a thing," but Bloat's decided he'd rather not), an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts of the amber left eye of a Weimaraner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate-blue veining in a distant cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset), rivets in the skin of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up girl . . . a few old Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2, a busted corkscrewing ukulele string, boxes of gummed paper stars in many colors, pieces of a flashlight, top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his blurry brass reflection, any number of reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down the hall -- a dictionary of technical
German, an F.O. Special Handbook or Town Plan -- and usually, unless it's been pinched or thrown away, a News of the World somewhere too -- Slothrop's a faithful reader.

I keep the jewel cases with the back tray info at home in storage, but that is changing this school year. the back tray info is worth keeping for trade-ins and also for those instances when the booklets don;t list track names.

i have considered cutting all the leaves out of my stolen cd booklets and sticking 'em into openable 3-ring binders, but i figure that by the time i get around to this, the idea of storing one's data in like, actual physical space will be laughably old-fashioned.

so yeah, this is a HUGE problem that we should all drop everything to solve for the good of the cd-buying-public...

I have roughly half my collection in a huge unsorted "recent acquisitions" pile that runs back about 2 years.

Either way it's too much hassle, AND the paper will get creased, AND if you throw away the rear artwork you can't trade the CD...

I guess I'm lucky to have plenty of space for lots of shelving (those lovely tall Ikea towers) and not need portability like if you're going back and forth to Uni.

Vinyl lives in my front room in a cupboard away from cats and kids.

The rotating ones? Last time I went to get another of those I was told they no longer stock them. (a safety or reliability problem was implied). Sadly I had to substitute a cheap & nasty one from Argos. Horrible colour & style, but practical. And, as I said, cheap.

As for sorting, the vinyl is in an old trunk in the living room, in a kind of "order of geographical origin, followed by chronological order". The tapes (so many 100's of tapes ...) are in black drawers stacked up in 3 places now. I lost it completely with sorting those into any kind of order a couple of years ago. Now it taked ages to find anything amongst them. CD's are roughly grouped by genre, but country of origin has a say too. Recently the CD's got split in half, between "current" & "old/CD of something this spendthrift had in an earlier format already"

I couldn't find this on their website, but on p125 of their 2003 catalogue, there's a huge black/white-lacquered thing with sliding doors called Dromme which stores 882 CDs in six compartments of three shelves each. The one person I know who owns one reckons you can nudge towards the 1000 mark if you have enough slim CD-singles, digipaks, slipcases, etc. He's taken the doors off the upper third and redistributed the shelves to store 7" singles.

I'm a boring alphabetical keep-the-jewel-case kinda guy, so no insights from me.

No - sounds hellish complex. I get the tall thin colums ones which hold, I think 180 'normal' CDs. (15 x 12). They're called 'Benno' in the catalogue and you can get them in various colours, but the bleachy pine is obv the one to go for ;) Weirdly, they are ALWAYS CHEAPER every time I go - I think the first one I bought was £50, and I paid £29 for the last couple. I've got 7 and they house most of my stuff, although there are various CD piles (recently bought pile, the 'kitchen' pile etc)

Hi Dr C!

Guess where I keep Bogshed! In the BOG or in the, wait for it....SHED!

(Hobbles away bent double supressing further titters....)

Then I realised I owned far too many records, so now they're alphabetical. If I own more than one record by any one artist they're listed in chronological order of release.

Sorry.

There's a 2003 catalogue already?

Yes, we're all geared up for 2003 'round our way', as they used to say in the Music Halls.

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

**It's all about space, weight, efficiency and ergonomic styling**

I don't need the space! And hey, my shelves look great - I can't think of anything worse than thumbing through a book thing to see my CDS.

One day I hope to thumb through my book thing with a gathering of family and friends, like a photo album, only mentalist.

Hey! Where do you all keep your minidiscs? Mine are in the cat litter.

Minidisc rummaging will soon be an It's a Knockout sport. You can get booklet/folder things for them, but they are aimed at the 'music on the move' market rather than home storage.

have two of those revolving ikea things and still have an argos tower's worth of overflow and piles littering the place. think the way forward is mp3 cds - everything stereolab ever did on a single disc, say, and reclaim that foot of shelf space. or an mp3* server - 160G disk or two should be enough for life. buy cds, rip them, take them down the record and tape exchange...

alphabetically and then chronologically. various artists in the argos tower. mp3 cds in a bad badtz maru wallet. tapes are still waiting to be unpacked since the last time i moved (almost 3 years ago)

andy

*sorry, ogg

No alphabetisation here (that would be madness), but grouping by field-rec/live-rec/comp/entire album/dicking about, etc.

(I see Koogy has beaten me to the punch on this; I will just say: entire oeuvre of artist on single CD-R in MP3 format = smashing, but sound quality goes out the window).

I do think alphabetical by artist is the only way that you can reliably find things, Lyra - and Ron's divider suggestion is an excellent idea.

Maybe I should transition to binder. Throwing out all those flimsy damn jewel cases would sure feel good.

4 of the posters on this thread have sent me MD's. Thanks, chaps. Peter I will send you a couple more, er, soon.

Still keep my vinyl alphabetically tho...go figure. Actually, I recently moved 208 of my favourite CDs into one of those Case Logic things so i could take them travelling, but I've decided, in spite of the massive portability advantages, that I don't like them at all, for the same reason I fear the mp3: you lose all the lovely artwork stuff...

Next question: Where do you keep your eight-tracks? Mine are in the glove box of my tow-truck.

Case Logic, say it soft and it's almost like praying...

My Cds are in no order whatsoever but they're on a variety opf things: racks on a shelf with loads more on top of that, all the soft cases to one side of that and then a tower next to the stereo. Most again, are either in the living room, the kitchen or other people's houses.

Vinyl is in crates, apart from a small selection which are ones I have played recently, right by the turntable.

I must get more organdised.