Music Tales from the Badly Organized

Hi everyone, hoping everyone had a great 2021 Christmas. I had a long think about what to write about next. I felt I had done HiFi, but I realized I never covered the dull side of maintaining a collection of music. This is certainly nothing I love, but being ordered give me some kind of contentment and to be honest I like things in their place where I can find them, it is pity I am not better organized. This is not part of the 12 articles about what I love, but it is a follow on. I will go in to some detail on how I structure my collection, why I did it that way and well some of the mistakes I made along the way.

If you only own less than a few 100 CDs or records, then you don’t really need to catalogue or organize your music, it takes far less effort to manually search for the Record or CD and find the album in iTunes or other media player. When you get into the thousands of anything, then you have to have some kind of filing system if you ever want to find something ever again.

Two thousand plus CDs and over 600/700 Records takes up a lot of space. In my case most of my living room wall space, except for a cat shelf (don’t ask) and a few books shelves. This collection grew organically over many years, a few CDs here and a few Records there. I had no plan as a teenager when I started, If I liked the music, and if I could afford it, I bought it, until 1997 I only owned 11 CDs and had maybe 30 records so I never even thought about organizing my music. As a teenager I was pretty lazy, and I was not considerate to the future me in any way. Move on to my 30s, and the rate at which I was buying music increased, charity shops and cheap music stores (FOPP, HMV, Oxfam, and the Sound Machine (Readings premier secondhand music store)) meant I was buying a few CDs a week and I still was not considerate to the future me. At this point iTunes hadn’t really taken off and I just stuck my CDs in a multi-CD player (two 300 CD player/changers) and the empty CD jewel boxes went into storage cases and put in the loft along with my vinyl record (my records were in a box in the loft at this point as I had no record player). The day I reached 600 plus CDs (more than the CD changer could take) I realized I had to be nice to today me and start working on filing all this music. This was around 2008, around the time I moved to a bigger house. The problem with that is there was always times when I got lazy and left the work to future me. We all do it, how many people stuff the Christmas decorations in a box and shove them in the loft with the word on their lips, “I will sort them all out next Christmas, when I have a bit more time.” I think I say that every Christmas.

This is my story of me sorting out my collection from that point. The first thing I did was put all the CDs back into the jewel cases (from the multi-CD player) and then put them on shelves in a semi-alphabetical order. That is to say all artists beginning with A in the A section, but not necessarily in alphabetical order within that letter section. This was fine for a few months, but the purchase of too many CDs with artists beginning with A, meant I was shuffling all my CDs along the shelves. This got boring very quickly and I would put new CDs in a New CD shelf to alphabetize them later. “Later” as we know does not really happen, so now I have some in alphabetical order and some in chronological order of purchase and recently played if I could not remember where it came from on the lettered shelves. I filled all the shelves I had and then I started reusing the CD storage cases from the loft to store the overflow, until such time I could build more shelves. Shelves are expensive by the way, even a Billy bookcase from Ikea are expensive when you need to buy a new one every 6 months or so, I ended up buying oak planks and shop fittings to keep the price down. By this time any sense and order go out of the window and I relied on memory or generally played only the nearest CD off the stack piled next to the CD player. By this time iTunes was invented and I just used iTunes to play my music, I tried to put all my CDs in iTunes, but as there were so many CDs, lots got missed and only my favorites ended up being on iTunes, the others ended up in piles around the house. I tried to make a pile of CDs not on the computer for sorting, but before you know it, hundreds of CDs need putting on the computer and you have no idea what is on the PC or where to start consolidating your collection on digital media.

This was me around 5 years ago, maybe 6 years. Today the only thing I really know for sure is that “All collections take up space and are never organized for more than the time it takes to purchase more”. I continued trying to sort them out, but my purchasing was outstripping my ability to file the music properly. About 2/3 years ago I came up with a plan. Forget alphabetizing stuff, just assign each Album with a number from 1 up based on the master iTunes library. The order does not matter. I exported a list of albums from my iTunes library put this in a spreadsheet and numbered all my music CDs. All my ripped music is either a CD, downloaded or a ripped record. Anything that is downloaded or a ripped record I mark as download or a record, it still got a number, but you cannot label a download and my records are a separate filing system tjhey just end up being gaps in the numbers. Everything else is a CD. I did my best to eliminate duplicates (for example CD1 and CD2 of an album and consolidated them into one Album), but some slipped through. The numbers on the CD do not reflect the number of albums I own; it is just a reference number for finding the CD on a shelf. The odd gap in the numbering does not matter whether a download, a vinyl record or disk two of a set. On the shelves themselves every 64 CDs (or more accurately every 64 numbers on the spreadsheet) have a CD marker on the shelf (you know the sort of thing, a piece of plastic or card with A, B or a Genre written on it). Why 64, well this is the Avery label size I used and each sheet had 64 labels and it seemed a good idea at the time, so I added another column with location and give each set of 64 numbers a number of its own I can find it on the shelf. It means I can go quickly to a shelf or location and then I only have to search a small area, by looking at the number on any CD and knowing what number I am looking for I can focus in quite quickly on the CD I am looking for. Christmas 2020 myself, my wife and mother in-law got a little bored during lockdown we found and labeled all CDs. Then I could determine if any were missing or lost and if any CDs were not on the computer which I could just add to the end of the numbering list on the spreadsheet. This worked pretty well and showed I had multiple copies of the same CD in some cases and other CDs had gone missing. I guess to the same place my socks go too (or at least one of each pair of socks).

When I buy new CDs, I now place the CD in quarantine until I can label it and add it to the list. Today while I am writing this article and adding music to iTunes, I will label them up by the end of today. This means every month or so I have a big pile of music to sort and file, but out of this pile I try to listen to the CD before filing to be sure it is worthy of being added to the collection, only two CDs have not made it, one that consisted of 74 minutes of just two notes being played, I forget the band and the “Chris Tarrant Party mix”, a very cheesy pop CD. I have a copy of the filing list on my phone, so if I think I already own the CD I can check, it is not perfect as on occasion I have bought duplicate CDs because the duplicate is in the quarantine section or I just didn’t check the list. The good news is Oxfam always benefits from my mistakes and they get my duplicates to sell for good causes. This is still a time-consuming operation. Quarantined music, excel spread sheets, printing labels sticking them to the CD, finding a shelf to put them on. A lot of weekends spent just dealing with physical music.

I hear you say, why bother, just stream or does it matter if you have all your music ripped, just listen to it via iTube, but I love my HiFi and want to use it, so I still play CDs and being able to find what you want it important to me at least. You may be thinking, that even with the CDs labeled, you would still have to search the list to find what you want, but how I simplified that is for next time.

As always, this is my view and nothing to do with the company I work for and thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this little tale from the badly organized, I would love to hear about how you sort your tunes, and what software works and was does not.

Next month I shall continue with more music tales from badly organized and go into more detail of the CD filing.