Ever see “High Fidelity”? You know, the John Cusack movie where the main character deals with his top five worst relationships and spends most of the movie organizing his record collection in autobiographical order?
I’ve never actually managed to sit through it. Just watched bits and pieces of it while my ma watched it years ago and found the whole sorting one’s records amusing.
Now, if you haven’t realized yet, I’m a little prone to being obsessive-compulsive. So, while my wife managed to get her whole collection in a set of binders and it’s compact because she got rid of the jewel cases… I can’t bring myself to do that. No, I like the whole package of a CD. It’s not like the old vinyl records, but at least there’s a front and back and sometimes they make the tray see-through so there’s more art on display. And sometimes they just do a halfassed job, and that bugs me. But not enough to pitch the rest of the package.
So I got a nice Laserline thing that held 80 CDs and that lasted me for quite a while. I got around having more than 80 CDs by taking some old crap and putting it in a box because I wouldn’t be too interested in listening to it…
And then it came time to get a new Laserline thingie, but no record stores had it.
Eventually the MP3 revolution hit and I got rid of the need to actually keep shuttling CDs in and out of a player and just ripped them to 196kb/s MP3s with LAME (since I wouldn’t need to worry about compatible players and somebody wrote some listening tests where they found that 196kb/s is pretty decent quality. So there was a pile in the back of the geekroom with some CDs in the laserline and then a pile of CDs atop the laserline.
I’m moving soon, a few miles south, to a place where I won’t wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if somebody stole my car.
I decided that I’m just going to move to dense-pack storage. I don’t need the disks out. So I’m just storing them, in their jewel cases, in storage boxes. I can store them vertically, which the NIST recommends you do. And they can sit somewhere with reasonable environmental control and serve as a reminder that I love a bunch of songs enough to line the pockets of some recording label executive who wouldn’t know good music if it hit him on the head with a 2x4.