Sunday, May 22, 2011

Help a Luddite



Okay, blog readers, I need a pep talk. We have a cabinet in our living room filled with cds. When it came time to move it, we emptied them all into shopping bags, which you see here. We've culled, and we have culled again. We could probably cull yet more. But we haven't been able to take the leap to all digital. So we started discussing whether we should ditch the jewel boxes and just keep the discs. That seemed like a good idea, so we went looking for cases. I wanted to be able to keep the cd inserts and rearrange the pages, but we couldn't find any cases with those features. We bought the least offensive cases we could find and figured we'd make do.


Today was to be the day I transferred everything into the cases, but I'm running into problems. Many of the discs don't have the songs listed on them and some don't even have the title! If I want to know what's on them, I need to keep at least a piece of the booklet. That means the cases will have all these little fluttery bits of paper in them, which seems like it could go south quickly.


Now I'm starting to wonder if keeping just the discs defeats the whole purpose of hanging onto the cds in the first place. If I want the booklets and cover art and all that, I need to keep the cds intact. If I'm going to end up with just the music, I might as well go digital. Right? Am I missing something? Help!

9 comments:

Allison said...

My husband is right now in the midst of the fourth re-organization of our records and CD's. He's tried all the systems. Keep everything intact, store the jewel cases in the basement and put CD's in zippered cases, cull the CD's, etc, etc. He's going back to CD only in the storage cases.

For what it's worth, I prefer a nice display of CD's on a bookshelf or something. I hate leafing through page after page of ugly storage case.

Julie said...

I bought CD books that held 120 CDs, ten of them I might add:). I used two pockets for each CD. One for all the papers I couldn't part with (I folded a flap on one side so they would fit neatly in the pocket) and the other for the disc itself. They have worked out wonderfully! They take up WAY less space and the book form is so appealing. I love my Ipod but just couldn't part with the hard copies:)

Darling Petunia said...

Allison, you are giving me mixed signals! ARGH! :)

I think we're going to have a modest collection of intact cds no matter what we do, because we both love Elvis Costello and want to hang onto the many autographed cds we have. We shouldn't care, but we do!

Darling Petunia said...

Julie, I can't picture what you're folding and how. Can you send me a picture or something?

Julie said...

The camera is not cooperating so let me see if I can explain what I have done. First I take the jewel cases apart and retrieve the front and back covers of the CD (or "album covers in my generation:). These are a little too wide to slide into the pockets so I fold one side in slightly so they will fit into the CD pockets in the book. The booklet that usually accompanies CD's fits perfectly already so I do not alter it in any way. My books have 3 rows of two pockets going down the page. I put all these papers in the first pocket and the CD right beside it in the second. Hopes this makes sense but this process works great for us. It fun to grab a book and leaf through and be reminded of all the great music we have. Having rows of CD's in jewel cases on a shelf is appealing but I find it hard to "see" and "recognize" the music we have. Another plus is the ability to pull out the booklet that comes with CD's and read all the info or sing along with the lyrics. Happy organizing too you!

Care said...

chuck 'em! hubs and I did a similar cleanout months ago and decided to unequivocally toss all the cases. we're not sorry. (yet?)

WendyCarole said...

can't help really. Most of ours are on itunes on the mac but we still have all the cds, loads of tapes and a shelf full of LPs

Megan Nordheim said...

I don't own any CDs. The only time I buy one is if it's something I know Clint&Marlo would like too (like the Wicked soundtrack). Then I burn it to my itunes and give them the CD. You won't miss having them clutter your house!

anotheryarn said...

I wouldn't call our music collection large, but we have stopped buying cds in the last 5 or 6 years... and have ripped just about everything we want to listen to. But I insisted on keeping the physical discs. If I had found a binder system I liked I would have used it, but I did not (not a cost effective version anyway) so we kept the jewel cases and I picked up some media-specific storage boxes (made by Iris) IIRC when they were 50% off at a certain large crafty retailer. The CDs live in those boxes and fit so much nicer than the banker boxers we used before that, in our "deep" household storage (ie garage or basement). We don't have that many cds though, less than 200.

You might check out Making it Lovely's CD organizing post (they appear to have a very large collection. http://makingitlovely.com/2010/04/26/cd-storage-and-organization/