Anyone with a large collection here sort by genre? If so, what genres do you segment by?

My new cd cabinets arrived yesterday and I'm going to look to get out of boxes asap. I'm thinking I want to sort by genre but haven't decided which ones

Soul/Funk/Gospel
Brazil
Africa
Rock en Espanol
World: Other
Reggae/Dub/Calypso/Soca
Jazz
Blues
Country
Hip Hop/Rap
Rock

are definites

But should I break up rock into other subs?

Punk
Post Punk
Garage
Psych
Pop
Rock - General

And if I break rock up into these, do I combine recent indie psych pop with 60's psych?

Where does alt country go if its not its own category? Country or Rock?

What about prince? I have no idea where to throw him? rock? soul/funk?

Help!

I think you should just relax about the sorting system and just have sex with me.

What about bands that could fit into two categories?

I still think alphabetical is the safest way to go.

Rock/Blues
Soundtracks/Comedy/Sound Effects/Other
Jazz
Classical

Alphabetical sorting within categories.

I just group my collection by artists. If there are related artists/bands, I group them together too.

I put mine in a continuum---e.g. reggae <---> dub <---> ambient

Singer-songwriters get their own section.

It's all pretty loose but it makes sense to me.

I think it really depends on how much representation you have in your collection for each category. For example I have a "shoegaze/ambient 90s" section because a lot of what I own fits into that.

Seems to work for me so far.

sub-genres should only break off when they can fill 33% of a shelf or cabinet section or if you have 33 or more cds of that sub-genre, whichever comes first. i hope this helps.

I'm actually being a lot more discriminating than that. I own a lot of any category that I'd consider breaking out.



I'd put the all of the artist's work in whatever one category fit them most. Thus if I owned all of willie nelson, his one reggae experiment would end up in country. I think overall though if the categories are defined well enough artists should fit in one category well enough. I'm struggling with the whole singer-songwriter category though. Do I leave most in rock? Do I broaden country to be country/folk and leave everything else in rock. I have enough probably to break folk out as its own category but having too many subcategories is what would create the problem of overlap I think.

It won't be perfect, but I think the benefits of being able to go through all my soul/funk, jazz or afropop recordings at once will outweigh any negatives.

my cds are segregated by race

Why not just go alphabetical? It was hard for me to do so, but I finally did that with my vinyl collection once it got to be pretty substantial in size and I haven't looked back.

My categories look like they will largely accomplish the same with the exception of jazz.

I switched to a genre sorting system and it turned out to be an unmitidated disaster.

I put it back (after a whole lot of work, sorting out all the genres) to an ordinary A - Z system after a couple of weeks of never being able to find anything.

It might well work out for you but I'd advise against and in my experience it's a major headache filing and finding albums, much more than I released when I came up with the grand plan.

so how do you do the husker du/bob mould/sugar/loudbomb/grant hart thing?

You should see the Gregg Alexander section of my collection. It's a mess.

I think you should sort by quality, and then throw out the suck.

No, seriously, I put pretty much everything together. It's just easier that way. Pop/rock/jazz/rap/R&B/C&W...L, the only thing I pull out separate are:

soundtracks (mostly because a lot of them are various artists kinds of things)
Fax stuff (for obvious reasons)
classical
seasonal stuff (I don't want to be listening to George Winston and Meryl Streep in anything but December)

So then you got things like Danzig/Miles Davis/Michelle Davenport/etc. It's funny.

It sounds cool to me. I've thought about this task, but always return to the A-Z stylee. What type of cabinets, btw?

The key to organization is "what are you going to remember". For me personally, I think seperating into post-punk, etc is going a little far (I mean how far are you then from alt-country, cowpunk, goth, etc you get my point). You'll always find more genre splitting hairs to seperate it into, especially in this ultra-categorized world we live in.

Other than separating female solo a/o fronted bands, I also go by genre, which I find easy due to a manageable sized collection(~500).

i do not have enough time to sort my collection and keep it sorted. it is totally willy nilly and thats the way I like it.

3 of the four drawer units

I think its going to work out really well but its taking far longer to get them out of their jewelboxes and into the sleeves than I expected. I think I spent 5 hours alone just on Brazilian cds.



I'm still debating it. I'm leaning against splitting rock up but still it might be nice to be able to say I'm in the mood to listen to a punk rekkid and go right to all of them or a sadcore album and find all of them. I mean I'm rarely going to be in the mood for both. It seems easy enough to sort them that way. I'm just not sure how deep I really want to go.

By color of the spines.

Definitely ditch the genre system. Nobody needs those kinds of decisions.

Why by genre? Why not abc-etically?

By Genre then Alphabetically within genre. Alphabetically works fine when you know which disc you're looking for but its harder if you just are thinking I want to listen to some funk and then have to go through your whole collection. I also notice that I get lazy often in trying to decide what to listen to -- I usually start at "A" and move across the racks until I find something that seems like it will serve my mood. As a result, I listen to A-M cds A LOT more than N-Z. I'd like to change that.

It'll also make making mixes a whole lot easier.

Its strange to me that people don't see the benefit of it. I'd assume that most would prefer the system but just not consider it worth their time to start over. I've got to start over anyway given the new cabinets so I thought might as well try to figure out the ideal system since I'm going to be too lazy to resort later.

i see the benefit, but i could never live with the concessions you have to make, like artists with dual genres, or whatever.

I file everything alphabetically - but I'm still at the point where I can remember which albums I own. However, if my collection ever gets anywhere close to the bigantic ginormousness of Billy G's, I predict I'll be breaking stuff down into genres too.

I don't know how I'd break rock down into effective subgenres, though.