Re-arranging my CDs - the joys of the audiophile life

Is the point of owning music (records, tapes, CDs) to listen to it or to organise it? Stupid-sounding question maybe, but sometimes I wonder. In recent years I've spent a growing amount of my time re-arranging my music stuff - both the hard media (as they say) and the digital files. If I'm not careful, I'm soon going to be using up more of my very valuable time in the never-ending business of renaming, re-ordering and re-shelving - than I actually spend er, listening to music. A librarian, not a music fan Anyway, my latest time-waster (sorry, essential bit of re-organisation) was to re-do my CDs. The key to this, I realised, was to sort by type. Shelves of only jewel cases. A shelf of digipaks (those carboard/paper outers surrounding the tacky plastic carton). Another section for the cardboard sleeves that don't have the plastic carton but do have a thick enough spine to have the artists and title printed on them. And so on ... (Incidentally, there seem to be about 15 types of CD container, including mind-numbingly dull variations like the digifile or q pack types.) Systems need an organising logic, right? So, naturally, like most people with records/etc I'm a slave to alphabetisation. Except ... now I'm mixing that with this sorting by type thing, my new typology!

Where did I put that Wave Pictures CD?

A growing number of my CDs are actually those ones that come in a cheap, thin cardboard sleeve. Plus - going even further down the pecking order - the ones that are essentially just a piece of paper folded around the disc. (And don't even mention the poor orphans with no sleeve at all, pathetically "nude" discs that just get slipped into a plastic wallet. The indignity of it all ...). My fabulous non-system for all these "thin" CDs is just to stack them up in piles and let them sit on a shelf like that - primitive but kind of functional. So there you have it. An entirely new layout for my CDs. One that only took me an entire afternoon to put into place (hmm). Of course the "listen to music or re-arrange it" dilemma I mentioned at the start of this blog is kind of false - because you can always listen to music when you're re-arranging it*. A double pleasure! Ah, the joys of the audiophile life ... 

Sagging shelves reflecting the weight I carry on my back

*My re-arrangement soundtrack (all on CD, naturally): 

Hanni El Khatib, Savage Times

Julian Mann, Daffodils

Pinheads, Is This Real?

Plus - a compilation of classical music with an "Italy" theme (Mendelssohn's Italian symphony etc) which was so terrible that even my classical music-loving partner wanted to dispose of it.