I have a confession to make: I’m starting to hate my CD and DVD collections.
Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love to collect and listen to music. I have a bad habit of going all-in when I discover a new band or artist, quickly collecting all of their albums and spending the next weeks or months on a bit of a musical binge.
The problem? I’ve amassed a sizable collection of shiny plastic discs. By my estimate, it’s roughly 500 albums from just over 200 different bands or artists. My wife has a smaller collection, roughly 100 discs, that adds a good chunk to the problem.
We have a similarly frustrating DVD collection, hovering somewhere around 300 discs, if you exclude our TV sets (which would easily double our DVD count to around 600 discs). The TV sets don’t cause much trouble, due to their high density (calculated by number of discs per unit of volume), but they add their own weight to the situation.
That adds up to around 1,200 discs to store. That’s not much, compared to some collections, but it’s enough for us that it’s a problem. This has been easily avoidable for a while: put ‘em in boxes, stack ‘em in the spare room. Out of sight, out of mind. Right?
We can thin out some of our collection (Why do I have an Eminem CD? Do we really need two copies of Tori Amos’ “Boys for Pele”?), but that gets us down to around 1,000 discs in a best-case scenario.
With our young’n on the way (my mother-in-law called him “Spock” today, which was pretty awesome), the spare room is no longer a room to spare. We now have to find a way to solve this.
I’ve cooked up a few options:
- Install custom shelving to house the entire collection. This isn’t unreasonable, but we don’t have an obvious place for such an installation. Furthermore, we’d simultaneously be creating a serious climbing or tipping hazard within 18 to 24 months.
- Rip the entire collection, then sell it. This is tempting, but I have some ethical objection to doing it. I also have quite an attachment to these stupid, shiny discs. I just can’t bring myself to part with the vast majority of them. That said, I’ll be re-ripping the entire CD collection to Apple Lossless soon. The DVD collection will probably not be ripped to a drive within the foreseeable future, so this is only a partial solution.
- Get rid of the bulky cases, then store everything in a set of CD or DVD binders. This is actually quite tempting, and the most probable solution. The only catch is that I will want everything sorted in a specific way (alphabetical by artist, then chronologically) and I have nightmares about buying any new album that fits somewhere between Aphex Twin and Widespread Panic. Shifting an entire collection three slots to the right could be incredibly difficult.
- Forget the binders. Use disc sleeves and a sturdy box or cabinet. This easily solves the problem of keeping things sorted how I like them, but maintains part of the storage problem. I could use a small dresser (via craigslist?) to house all of the sleeves in the corner of the family room or under the window in the master bedroom. But what about multi-disc albums?
- Leave it all in the boxes and find a new place to store them. We have some closet space, and limited attic storage, but this only delays the inevitable.
None of these are particularly groundbreaking, but I’m leaning toward options 3 and 4. Case Logic has some great products for this sort of thing (check out their 320-disc CD binder, 200-disc DVD binder, and storage sleeves) at relatively affordable prices, so that helps.
I know that I’m not the only one out there to have tackled this, so I’m asking for your help: What do you do with your collection of plastic discs? What do you like or dislike about your current storage and sorting situation?
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