Quality sleeve-based CD storage solution

January 20, 2015 10:47 AM

I have over 1000 CDs and am considering transferring them to sleeves in binders (preferable) or drawers (less preferable). Please recommend a good vendor for such a storage system.

I'm somewhat anal-retentive and control-freaky (c'mon, I have an MLIS) and I want to be able to organize them in a way that I can find them as well as interfile new discs I buy in the future. I also want the storage system to be of such a quality that my discs will not be damaged. I already use CaseLogic sleeves in Ikea storage boxes for a portion of my collection (genres where I have only a couple hundred CDs and that do not grow rapidly), but if I did that for my whole collection I'm afraid it would take up too much shelf space.

I found this question but it is from 2006.

Please do not suggest digitizing, as I have fully considered that option and I use it to the degree that makes sense to me, which is to not use it for 100% of my collection.

posted by matildaben to Technology (6 answers total)

How do you want to access your music? And how fast will your collection grow? Do you have any reason to carry a binder around away from your sizable collection? DO you ever lend out discs?

It's nice to be able to flip through binders, as it is much more visual than drawers sleeved CDs, which just look like a lot of plastic pages. But interfacing new CDs sounds like a pain if you want to maintain binders, unless you are OK re-sorting your collection every time you get something new, or you're talking about cases with individual CDs in sleeves, so you could leave enough space to allow for the addition of a few new CDs without having to shift every disc down from that point on. Of course, you could leave a blank space on each page of 6 discs, allowing for some more ease of growth within a binder.

Also, where will these cataloged discs reside? Binders generally aren't very pretty, but you can get (or make) some very nice CD drawers.

Personally, I have a wall of CDs, kept in their original cases. It takes up a lot of wall space, but is shallow, so this can be situated in a hallway, and 1000 discs isn't that many, taking up about 33 linear feet, measured only along the spine of a standard single-disc case. While that sounds like a lot, that's if you only have one row high of discs. At 5 rows tall, that's ~6.5 linear feet, maybe 3 feet tall.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:22 AM on January 20, 2015

It might be easier if you imagine how your collection will look once stored. Here's a Google image search for "1000 cd storage" and you can see a range of display/storage options already, though I doubt they all hold 1,000 CDs in cases.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:29 AM on January 20, 2015

I bought some pretty boxes from Ikea specifically to store disks. I've put the covers and disks into DVD sized sleeves and filed them in the boxes. LOVE IT.

Supermediastore.com has great systems for doing this.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 11:37 AM on January 20, 2015

I have hundreds of CaseLogic sleeves, of the single disc, non-hole-punched variety. The good news is that many of them are at least a decade old and they still look OK. They do require some sort of containment system since they don't stand up on their own. I tried boxes, but the boxes were too much of an annoyance to me. Now I have them on an IKEA BILLY bookcase with CD inserts, and they fill the BILLY to a much greater density than jewel cases do. I have them wedged in there not-quite-too-tightly (so they stand up on edge), and periodically I have to redistribute things as specific cubbies get too full from new acquisitions.

I think what I'd love is an oversized card catalog style cabinet that could contain the sleeves, because then I could at least put labels on the fronts ("POPULAR MUSIC, A-BL"), and I wouldn't have to worry about an open box getting knocked over. I also don't particularly like the way the BILLY looks when it's full of sleeves, but it's not like I have a better solution.

The CaseLogic sleeves also present an annoyance in that they all have the little slot for you to insert a title strip, which you can either write on included perforated strips, or tear off the perforated edges of all the case inserts if you're feeling destructive. I made a template and printed a bunch of them, but man, that got old. You can look at my BILLY and see where I got tired of inserting the title strips, but I got pretty good at eyeballing where on the shelf a particular CD might be.

I considered the various binder versions, but I don't like the sheets of four (what happens when I need to insert a new CD?) and the little binders for individually punched sleeves just aren't remotely cost effective.

I also kept all the case inserts (intact) but I gave the jewel boxes away on Freecycle. I had separated all the completely clear boxes from the ones with grey inserts while putting all the CDs into sleeves in the first place, and I had them in two different lots, but the same guy took them all.
posted by fedward at 11:43 AM on January 20, 2015

I'm in the process of transferring my cd's into chests with Jewelsleeves. The plastic cases go into that part of the trash.
posted by brujita at 1:09 PM on January 20, 2015

Matildaben, did you get my memail and fb messages?
posted by brujita at 6:22 PM on January 20, 2015