Wow, it's been awhile...but kinda not since I see most of your happenings on FB.

I moved 3 years ago, and my CD collection is sadly still in piles or boxes. LPs are organized in the living room, because...company. But the CDs remain in my office. In piles, in rubbermaid containers and boxes.

Digitizing is not a priority right now.

I need to somehow think about how to organize 5000 cds +/- into a more manageable space in my office so that I can a) actually access them, and b) if the inevitable move down the line comes, never again haul 5000 said cd cases up 3 flights of stairs.

Purging is imminent. Got a whole lot of promos and whatnot that I can ante up for the cause.

Right now I have one 1000 capacity wall shelf thing. Another shelf isn't out of the question.

I took all my DVDs out of their cases and binder'd them up, and that works for them because I could care less about the covers. I was thinking about the white envelope with CD+liner notes+back cover. Has anyone done this here? If so, drawbacks (obvious is no way to visually identify from spine)? I'm thinking it'll equal a 3:1 ratio of cds to cased cd. I think someone did the whole plastic envelope awhile back. BillyG, maybe? Thoughts?

Next, I want to somehow catalog my stuff. I used Orange once upon a time and it was a drag. There's got to be an app that scans in the barcodes now, right? Something that can store my info in a cloud but I can print out a database if need be?

This whole thing would be so much easier if I had like 100 cds, and could go on Pinterest and see some cutesy idea that I could buy at Michael's.

Rock Banana for old times sake.

2000 paper cd sleeves for $28

Above are the paper sleeves. They aren't glamorous, but I think they'll do the trick?

Have you considered a drawer-type system like they have at local libraries?
You can keep your CDs in the plastic or paper sleeves (with the liner notes, if you DO decide that you want to keep them), and stick little cards in between for alphabetical breaks to make searching easier.

1. Purge if you must.
1a. Last year I decided to listen to my entire collection. It took me literally 365 days of dedicated listening to get through 2,000+ items. Loved every minute of it, BUT, it still makes one question if there is such a thing as having "too much" music.
1b. I've got four 500-count shelves in my office. I'm pretty much at the point where if I get something new, something old has got to go so it will fit.

2. White envelopes will save space. The only thing I don't like about them is you'll need to carefully fold in the back cover spine sides to make them fit. I have everything in cases and some of them still are getting weak at the folds (usually the ones with perforated edges).

3. I use Discogs to catalog my collection. As I worked on accurately cataloging, it went from convenient to tedious to addicting. It might help with the purge as well. I had someone message me out of the blue yesterday looking for some crappy punk 7" that I don't care about anymore.
3a. Recordnerd is still around, if you want a straight up simple list. The only downside is you have to manually enter every field, and it isn't as searchable as Discogs.

The drawers are intriguing but I feel like it'd take up more real estate in the office than the shelf which sticks out slightly more than the length of a cd. Will look into this more though.



Yeah, there's just a lot of stuff I don't need that somehow I ended up with--probably because I used to grab the radio station's mail and come back to my dorm and sort. Like, I literally have 6 promo copies of Limp Bizkit's 3rd album that Interscope sent us (in the end I think we topped out at 16 copies total sent). Nobody's got time for that. So purging isn't so much a purge of stuff I actually listened to, but stuff I've accumulated and have no interest in.



Yeah...this is sadly the bummer. I think with anything, except going full-on cases there will be casualties.



Do both of these support an app, or do I download a barcode reader app? Discogs sounds better...Recordnerd sounds torturous.

No idea about fancy apps. Discogs is as easy as clicking "Add to collection." The tricky part is, is that if you have a bunch of weird promos, imports, limited editions, etc. there will be separate listings for each. So, if you care about getting your collection EXACTLY right, it'll take some time, and some squinting at your spines and discs ("Is that a 5 or an 8???!?!?!")

Here are all 66 versions of LB's third album:

https://www.discogs.com/Limp-Bizkit-Cho ... ort_order=

I use this app which works with discogs for categorizing cds. It works with the camera to scan barcodes for easier entry. I've only recently started to use it so I have made only a few entries. The problem with discogs is that it asks you for very specific detail on the album releases...(is it the original printing, a japanese import, BMG edition, etc. when all you really want is the basic information.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... discogs_v1

On my PC, I have been using this software called Visitrax for years. I paid to use it and it still gets free updates. You pop the cd into your computer's cd drive, (if it still has one, I need to use an external on my laptop now) and it searches the database, and you add it to your collection. Everything is in 1 file that can be backed up. http://www.synapsa.com/ The beauty is that you can search/sort it by year, genre, artist, track, album, (even on compilations.) which works great for my CMJ sampler discs.

I faced the same problem about 10 years ago and bought 3 of these:

https://jewelsleeve.com/shop/jewel-chests.html

The four drawer units hold over 1300 cds when you junk the cases and use the jewel sleeves. It was a pricey solution though and the sleeves works best for getting rid of all the plastic jewel cases. Things that come in cardboard tri-fold either need to be cut up to fit in the sleeves or stored separately.

As far as databasing goes, I use RYM. The admins are a little anal about approving the addition of new titles when they aren't already listed which is a pain in the ass. I couldn't see myself spending the time to start all over with a new platform though.

Two recent purchases have seen me think about a re-organization - a PC with a huge hard drive and a new swanky carbon turntable.

I'm basically transitioning back to vinyl now (hello 1991!) as the truth of the matter is I rarely listen to CDs after they ripped on to iTunes.

Problem is I have so many CDs and I want to digitalize my whole collection before I start taking stuff off the shelves. I had a week of work a few weeks back and I was ripping albums all day every day and I didn't even get to A, only managed soundtracks and compilations. Even now, 2 months later I'm still only at B. It's going to be a long haul but maybe by the end of the year I'll get there.

Once everything is digitalized I will just dumb the jewel cases and box a lot of the albums I don't care much for and hopefully reclaim about 50% of the space currently taken up.

Also I'm hoping that the extra calories burned getting up to change the sides of the vinyl albums will perhaps give me an extra year or two of life before the inevitable coronary.

When I was listening to my vinyl, almost exclusively from Sept to Dec, I will flipping 4-10 records a day, every day. After a while I was like, "Yeah, this DOES get pretty old."

My new turntable doesn't have auto-stop. One of these days I'm gonna forget to turn it off before bed and the record will have a bigass gouge at the end.

There is no answer to this question.

Now that my oldest son is 3 this happens a few times a week. It does way less damage than you'd expect it to. As I'm typing this right now the record he last picked is still spinning. Probably from before we took him to school this morning.

Yep, RYM can be pretty awful sometimes. I submitted an entry for an artist's EP and it was approved, then someone came along later and submitted a duplicate entry for that same EP but listed it as an album. RYM wanted me to go through all this rigmarole to try and get the album entry deleted.

I like the barcode scanning feature. Might speed up the process of adding to the collection a little. Also easier to browse my collection than it is on the website.

Yeah, this was the system I had remembered. Kinda surprised I remembered it since it was a decade ago

I've done it a handful of times. More stress than damage.