How Do You Organise Your CD/vinyl etc. Collection?

1970's Fan

1970's Fan

Super Member
I'm thinking of reorganising my CDs because my tastes have changed a bit to favouring jazz. Have you got an easy to use format? I haven't got a lot (less than 500). Do you organise them into female vocal or the female artist by name for instance?
 
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jpo_tx113 said:
Alphabetical by artist. With 1000+ on each I have to do this so I can find what I want with ease.
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The only way to do it. Anything else requires too many arbitrary decisions - is this jazz or rock? Female vocalist or rock group?

Of course, you do have to decide whether Big Brother and the Holding Company is under B or J for Joplin, etc.
 
Genre, Artist. That's it.

For Vinyl, Jazz is 80 percent of my collection so it get's top shelf and a few more shelves. CD's are mostly Pop/Rock, then Jazz then Classical then whatever.

Then Classical/Rock/Pop/Folk-Country/Misc. I only have about 10 Folk/Country so that's easy and not sorted by artist. Miscellaneous for me is anything that I have one or two of or oddballs like test records.

I just ripped my entire CD collection to the cloud (actually two cloud servers and one home server NAS), so I don't think I'll be actually pulling CD's much any longer, but you never know. I may want to still listen to a disc rather than stream from the cloud.
 
Alphabetically by artists LAST name or band/group name.

Classical is a separate section of vinyl & CD; not enough to sort alphabetically.
 
I can see floor to ceiling shelving in my future so when that day comes I'll have to reorganise again. So far it's jazz guitar, bass, female vocal modern (Krall etc.) and female traditional like Holliday/Fitzgerald etc.
I only have two cheap seven pigeon hole columns as storage so far 'til I get my rotary storage unit so it'll not take me long :D. I wouldn't mind seeing pics of your music storage.
 
By genre (my definition, cuz its my house...and no one else looks at it anyway), then alphabetical, which is by last name of artist or first letter of band (so Pink Floyd isn't under "F").
 
alphabetical by artist then by year within artist group

classical is a mess. Just piles that no one but I can understand.
 
SAFETYDAWG said:
Alphabetically by artists LAST name or band/group name.

Classical is a separate section of vinyl & CD; not enough to sort alphabetically.
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This is what I do. I also have a database using MS Access that has all the pertinent information. The DB makes finding things very easy as I can look up anything in just about any way imaginable. For example, every song that's 2 minutes in length or every song that has the word "First" in the title is easily found.

Media Monkey which is my preferred music playback application includes a lot of data including the album cover. However with a reasonably sized collection (mine is 1600 CD's) on a music server a DB comes in handy. Most of my vinyl will never get "ripped". It's too time consuming to rip a bunch of (3500+) LP's.
 
Alphabetical by the artist's first name, I don't know too many people that refer to artists by their last name first.....Ahmad Jamal under 'A' and Joni Mitchell under 'J'

But that's just me:D
 
Oh yeah! What about "Trane"?:D

The only time I've ever seen CD's/LP's in alphabetical order by artists first name was a CD store that closed years ago. It was owned by Russian immigrants. I always thought they did it that way because English was not their primary language.

Last name, first name works for libraries and me.
 
I would think that organization is a very personal thing, and that each person should come up with a method that works for them.

That said, I'll share my methods, since it was asked for. My vinyl is in genres, with preferred genres on the left and lesser ones as you move right (this is vinyl on a shelf). Within each genre I have preferred artists/bands on the left and lesser preferred further right. Within each band is chonological order of releases. CDs are by genre, with the first section of each genre being compilations in alpha order, followed by artists/bands in alpha order.

When I had cassettes, I had them organized by manufacture, then model line - in the order in which I bought them. Completely regardless of the music recorded on them, but it worked for me.

My dad has his vinyl in alpha order in a cabinet in the living room. On top of that was a flip tray from a record store with "current faves" in the order of last played in front. Lesser artists were in the basement in his office, in alpha order. Least popular were stored in the garage on huge shelves he built. No idea on the order there. Random perhaps.

I won't even begin to describe how I have the files on my hard discs organized.

Whatever works!
 
Gruvin' said:
Alphabetical by the artist's first name, I don't know too many people that refer to artists by their last name first.....Ahmad Jamal under 'A' and Joni Mitchell under 'J'



But that's just me:D
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This. 2500 LPs, 1200 CDs and 500 7". Only bitch is the letter J is an hellaciously large category.

No further organization except to group all of a particular artists releases in that format together.
 
I loaded all of my appx 5,000 into my computer's external hard drive, then transferred them to a Sony HAP-Z1ES. (A simple process) The actual discs are boxed up in the garage as opposed to taking up space in the house. The Sony acts as a giant iPod with DSD resolution and is easily controlled through an iPad. This way I have three copies including the original discs and no clutter.
 
I feel the need to organise already with my small collection so having thousands would make it a nightmare trying to locate a cd without good organisation.
 
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