Blank media through my life
Mar. 19th, 2009 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneToday I've been tackling my CD collection as part of my organizing process.
This is one section I had assumes was already in order. I've got three CD racks that each hold 250 jewel cases. Upon these I've put my music CDs in reverse alphabetical order and reverse chronological within a band.
I chose this method back when I was in high school (or possibly early college), when I had more than one hundred CDs and could no longer use the cute colors system.
When I first started buying CDs in 1987, I was in junior high school. Once I had enough discs to need a holder, I got what I thought would be more than enough for a long time: a wooden box with plastic slots for three columns of 30 CDs each. I put all of the jewel cases with spines in black on the left column, all the white spines on the right column and all of the colors into rainbow order in the middle column. It looked cute. It was also weighted toward some odd shades of brown and green.
This got cumbersome when I had to blow time weighting color densities and had to memorize color tones to find things. I didn't want to use straight alphabetical order because that seemed too much like grade school seating arrangements. All the kids with names at the end of the alphabet always got screwed. Since I'm at the beginning of the alphabet, I'd feel guilty. So I chose reverse-alpha, which puts Zuco 103 on the far left of the first rack and the English band A at the bottom right of my third rack. I also chose reverse chrono so that anyone looking at a stack of one musician's work would see the evolution of creativity.
Compilation discs with various artists get filed under "Collection", the term we used at my university's radio station. Those are sorted reverse-alpha within that section, although I put "Songs in the Key of X" under Collection -> X because it's the word one really thinks up first.
That feels very orderly, right? It's all visible and simple to search. Unfortunately, it only works for music CDs that have jewel cases and liner art. Burned music discs wind up in a binder if they don't stay in paper sleeves for a decade. Data CDs that have jewel boxes go in a smaller tower, where they are sorted by operating system and not much else. DVDs and VCDs wind up in reverse alpha by title -- or they should, if I ever get around to sorting them.
The other problem is that the ordered section had several members floating around my apartment until last month. I'd gather a few CDs to rip to MP3 and forget to put them away. I also had a couple CD shopping sprees during the past year, where I'd get stuff at CEX downtown or I bought stuff while I was in France, and still had those discs sitting in one giant bag in the bedroom closet. This meant my collection of 600-odd music CDs in jewel boxes on the racks was really a 700-item collection.
I spent an hour putting away over 50 music CDs today. I had sorted the CDs last night, but I needed the hour to get enough space in each shelf to add content. I usually leave two or three spaces for growth on each shelf, but this reshelving killed all of those. I wound up rotating two-thirds of a shelf onto an empty shelf and realizing I only have one more empty shelf left.
Today I've also discovered how many dang discs I have that don't even have labels. This was tolerable in the days of blank cassettes, because I'd usually been meticulous with putting track listings on the paper liners of the cases and I kept the tapes in their cases. With loose, ripped CDs I have no clue whether I'm looking at data, music, or just a blank.
This reminds me of sorting my old floppy discs. I rarely put labels on them because I never had the thin felt-tip pens necessary to update the contents, real pens would press too deeply into the plastic through to the magnetic media, and pencils were illegible on those shiny stickers. Often I'd put a cute name on a disc (such as "The Brain Police", half the name of a Mothers of Invention song, or "Talk Line With Soul", the last line from a 900 number that had a catchy jingle) and have to pop the disc into the computer to find out what was on there.
I should come up with an organization system for the data CDs because I have enough of them. Some of them are just frisbees waiting to be tossed, such as installer discs for long gone hardware or out-of-date, bootlegged operating systems.
Some discs have no marking at all. They could be blank! Oh man, this is gonna be fun. I've put labels on anything I've made in the last few years, but some of these may be gifts. Now they will be gifts again, eh?
This is one section I had assumes was already in order. I've got three CD racks that each hold 250 jewel cases. Upon these I've put my music CDs in reverse alphabetical order and reverse chronological within a band.
I chose this method back when I was in high school (or possibly early college), when I had more than one hundred CDs and could no longer use the cute colors system.
When I first started buying CDs in 1987, I was in junior high school. Once I had enough discs to need a holder, I got what I thought would be more than enough for a long time: a wooden box with plastic slots for three columns of 30 CDs each. I put all of the jewel cases with spines in black on the left column, all the white spines on the right column and all of the colors into rainbow order in the middle column. It looked cute. It was also weighted toward some odd shades of brown and green.
This got cumbersome when I had to blow time weighting color densities and had to memorize color tones to find things. I didn't want to use straight alphabetical order because that seemed too much like grade school seating arrangements. All the kids with names at the end of the alphabet always got screwed. Since I'm at the beginning of the alphabet, I'd feel guilty. So I chose reverse-alpha, which puts Zuco 103 on the far left of the first rack and the English band A at the bottom right of my third rack. I also chose reverse chrono so that anyone looking at a stack of one musician's work would see the evolution of creativity.
Compilation discs with various artists get filed under "Collection", the term we used at my university's radio station. Those are sorted reverse-alpha within that section, although I put "Songs in the Key of X" under Collection -> X because it's the word one really thinks up first.
That feels very orderly, right? It's all visible and simple to search. Unfortunately, it only works for music CDs that have jewel cases and liner art. Burned music discs wind up in a binder if they don't stay in paper sleeves for a decade. Data CDs that have jewel boxes go in a smaller tower, where they are sorted by operating system and not much else. DVDs and VCDs wind up in reverse alpha by title -- or they should, if I ever get around to sorting them.
The other problem is that the ordered section had several members floating around my apartment until last month. I'd gather a few CDs to rip to MP3 and forget to put them away. I also had a couple CD shopping sprees during the past year, where I'd get stuff at CEX downtown or I bought stuff while I was in France, and still had those discs sitting in one giant bag in the bedroom closet. This meant my collection of 600-odd music CDs in jewel boxes on the racks was really a 700-item collection.
I spent an hour putting away over 50 music CDs today. I had sorted the CDs last night, but I needed the hour to get enough space in each shelf to add content. I usually leave two or three spaces for growth on each shelf, but this reshelving killed all of those. I wound up rotating two-thirds of a shelf onto an empty shelf and realizing I only have one more empty shelf left.
Today I've also discovered how many dang discs I have that don't even have labels. This was tolerable in the days of blank cassettes, because I'd usually been meticulous with putting track listings on the paper liners of the cases and I kept the tapes in their cases. With loose, ripped CDs I have no clue whether I'm looking at data, music, or just a blank.
This reminds me of sorting my old floppy discs. I rarely put labels on them because I never had the thin felt-tip pens necessary to update the contents, real pens would press too deeply into the plastic through to the magnetic media, and pencils were illegible on those shiny stickers. Often I'd put a cute name on a disc (such as "The Brain Police", half the name of a Mothers of Invention song, or "Talk Line With Soul", the last line from a 900 number that had a catchy jingle) and have to pop the disc into the computer to find out what was on there.
I should come up with an organization system for the data CDs because I have enough of them. Some of them are just frisbees waiting to be tossed, such as installer discs for long gone hardware or out-of-date, bootlegged operating systems.
Some discs have no marking at all. They could be blank! Oh man, this is gonna be fun. I've put labels on anything I've made in the last few years, but some of these may be gifts. Now they will be gifts again, eh?
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-20 06:55 am (UTC)It amused me when the guy commented on the number, saying it was a good year.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-23 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-24 02:29 pm (UTC)