I just have them in a special box, and also a backup on computer hard drives. Ordered by size. |
When I first started dating my future wife, she made fun of how organized my LP & CD collections were. So I thought she has a point and let them get completely disorganized. I then found myself wanting to listen to piece X and spending literally ten minutes looking for the damn recording. So I went back to organization. It just saves time. |
Mine is organized in a simple fashion by name or last name of an individual artist by category:
Rock
Jazz
Classical
Show
Country/folk/bluegrass
Does anyone have a good electronic cataloging system. I was using "cardfile" but the software was discontinued. |
1. Alphabetical. "The Beatles" filed under B; "50 Foot Wave" filed prior to the A's; "Bob Dylan" filed under D.
2. Date of album's original release
3. Date of that copy of the album's pressing (ie original first, reissues after)
I don't classify by style or any other method, and use the same system for both CD's and vinyl.
With that system, I can find anything in a flash. Only problem is...when things are so well organized, it can be easy to skip over that one Folk Implosion album you have in there and pay more attention than you'd expect to the big collection of Belle & Sebastien albums. But then there are days that I just get in a mood to pick out one-off albums, like today when I pulled out Fishbone's "Truth and Soul" for the first time in a few years... |
Ignore "the" and "A".
If you can't figure that one out on your own, I suggest Audiofeil's recommendation. |
1. Alphabetical order.
2. Mono or stereo.
3. Country
4. origial release or reissue
5. Type of music. |
By playing time from shortest to longest.
Tiebreakers are:
Catalog number
Vinyl thickness
Label color |
What do folks do when bands or flicks are named A... ?? or The... ??
I'm always torn between keeping or dropping the A & The from the names... yet thereafter I can fail to remeember I did..... but there's sooooo many A's & The's. |
Not organized at all. The artists are grouped, but that's about it. I find that when I'm looking for a certain one, sometimes I have to go throught them all, maybe twice, but during the search I'll run across something I haven't listened to in a long time, and will give it a spin. I may forget about who I was trying to find initially. I know it's crazy, but where most people know right where to look, they may never play others because they weren't looked over.
I have around 800-900 lp's, I'm guessing 400-500 cd's. One cassette tape. |
Synthfreek,
Yes. Lots of John Lennon, Coltrane, Mayall, Johan, etc. A Clockwork Orange is the first one, ZZ Top last (I just looked). The beauty is I can find them within a minute.
I tried genres, colors, moon phases, mothers maiden name.
What's nice and truly remarkable is when I host an audiophile session, and an Audiofoo member asks, "hey, you got 'Fire' by Arthur Brown, mannnn?" Before the slobber hits the carpet, all the other foos will tell him it's under A because Mike keeps all his LPs in... and the dude, or dudienne (not dudette, a friend wrote a research paper on this very subject) can find it themselves and I can sit comfortably sipping, smoking and working on a pressure sore.
Just living the life, baby. |
Oregon...by FIRST name...really? That's a first. Don't you have gobs of different artists under common names like John or Steve? |
The majority of my CD's (2400+)are in boxes in storage. Everything is ripped to a music server which feeds several squeezeboxes including a highly modified SB2. Organizing, alphabetizing got to be a real PITA. Now, I can find any disc in seconds and don;t have to worry about putting it back. (see above). FYI - my music server, and it's two external laptop drives, is totally silent, cost pennies a day to run and takes up about as much space as the average paper back book. |
by geography....sf, la, northwest, texas, boston, new york, michigan, chicago, sotheast, midwest, germany, etc. |
Organized? Absolutely!
Everyone of my discs are in my house.
Somewhere.
I'm a heck of a taker outer, and very bad at being a putter backer.
Consequently, switching into hard drive based music playback has been uh... better. Apart from the 3 or 4 ROM Drives I went through ripping everything.... a few times. Backing up? see putting backer. But I'm backed up now. Definitely!
But I still have a mega changer and will add another.
Same way for DVDs... my latest gig is putting all my top/fav DVDs onto a pair of hard drives. One is a NAS, and it's cool to fire up the laptop and watch a flick or play some music whereever.
Mac.... tex
Do consider ripping those records into 24/96 or better. |
About 1500 Lps and 200 Cds.
All are in alphabetical order starting with the first letter. Roland Kirk is "R". The Beatles "B" etc. Lps are in Ikea Expidit shelves (perfect and cheap).
Cds removed from jewel case and placed in case logic sleeves to save on space.
Cds are stored in Ikea boxes which look good and keep dust out. |
All of my CDs are stored in binders along with the liner notes. They're arranged alphabetically by artist/band.
I'm creative with how my binders contribute to the decor of the room, too. They're usually laying around in front of the system rack, some open, some closed. The word that comes to mind is "disarray". In this fashion they compliment the room. |
I have many records I don't know I have. Bought mass quantities of them when record stores went out of bissness in the late 80s. Haven't played them all yet. |
Funny, I was just thinking about how super-organized my CD's are compared to my LP's. About two years ago, I ripped all my CD's to a hard disk on a server. Since then, I use music manager software (SqueezeServer) in which I can search for titles, artists, dates, or whatever to find exactly what I seek. It really opened the door for me to explore my CD collection. For instance, if I search for Margo Timmons (lead singer for Cowboy Junkies) I discover that she sang a cut on Leo Kotke's "Big Bad Boy" album called "Pepe Hush." Never knew she was on that album!
On the other hand, my LP's are alphabetically organized, but if I want to find Renaissance band music, I'm screwed. Gotta get some structure/database going (see my other thread, posted about the same time you posted yours).
Organization is one of the keys to enjoyment as your collection grows. Otherwise you end up only playing about 5% of your collection and don't realize some of the other great stuff you have. Or at least that's been my experience. |
Brauser, any chance you can post some pictures of your collection? Indeed! What a tease... |
I keep my vinyl, which I only started re-collecting a year ago, in alphabetical order. All of the records in MoFi sleeves, and the jackets in a re-sealable plastic outer liners. Only about 200.
SACD's and DVD-Audio's are in a large CD folder, no cases, in alphabetical order. About 100.
CD's are banished to the attic or somewhere else, I am not really sure where. I have ripped them all to Lossless files, and store them on a Drobo/Droboshare network storage. It's a 4 SATA hot swap-able array, with internal backup, and infinite (well how ever big 4 SATA drives can get) storage. Not cheap, but pretty much idiot proof.
I am in the process of deciding which Analog Digital Converter to buy to rip my vinyl to lossless digital files. I'm thinking of the Korg MR2000s. |
I have used 5 of the giant CD megachangers for storage and a Mac based software to catalog the music since 2001. This allows you to find anything instantly by "search", sends a command to the relevant player and plays the track - all of this gets round the fiddly jewel-case problems and physical filing of the jewel-cases (ever feel like an assembly line worker at a factory when listening to music - you know what they pay DJ's to do - well the system gets rid of that feeling).
Currently I am burning lossless to iTunes and storing the lossless on a NAS 1 TB Raid1 network hard drive - this will take me about two months to complete the transition. |
Brauser, Any chance you can post some pictures of your collection? It sounds impressive. I would love to see them. |
I can find a specific disc within 15 seconds.This has always amazed me because,for some reason, I can't seem to find anything else most the time.I guess some things are more important than others!!!!!!!! |
I have tried to make CD storage an 'art form' in our house. We had our home custom built with the audio system as a center piece. As a result there are no exposed wire and all CDs are organized into leather binders in wooden shelves labeled with brass tabs. All of these and the audio componets are in custom bifold closets which allows them to be hidden or displayed. Inside the closets are lighted antique RCA Victor and recording studio signs. I believe that music is one the greatest gifts in life and should be treated as such. |
Since I have more records than I do cd's, I use Google Documents to keep track of what I have and also have the albums in the bins in alphabetical order.
Instead of doing a word of the day....are you trying to do a new thread a day ? |
I keep CDs and records grouped by artist and also by stye or genre. Very loosely organized compared to my itunes or squeezebox data bases. |
