I have a decent-sized CD collection (about 800 or so) that I rarely use. Pretty much everything I listen to has been ripped into iTunes, so my CDs are just a cluttered eyesore taking up space in my office.
I couldn’t justify selling them, since I want to keep them in case something happens to my hard drive, not to mention it wouldn’t be fair to the musicians to sell the CDs and still keep the music. But I wanted to get them out of my office since I rarely (if ever) use them.
I bought some storage boxes by Disc Storage Solutions (which, for some reason, were extremely difficult to find online). The discs are put in sleeves — two per sleeve — and stored in the boxes. I ended up using two 500 CD and three 200 CD boxes; they hold half the CDs they advertise for me, since I’m also storing the CD artwork (instead of two CDs per sleeve). Now they’re taking up very little space in the basement, rather than two large shelves in my office.
Of course, now that they’re boxed up it’s more difficult to browse through them. I bought Delicious Library, a CD/DVD/game/whatever cataloging app for the Mac. You just scan the CD’s barcode using your webcam and it adds it to your library — complete with artwork — or you can also enter them manually (for compilations, bootlegs, and those barcodes that just won’t scan).
Delicious Library works great, though I wish it had other browsing options: for example, there’s no way to browse your CD collection by genre. But overall it’s much better than having a wall of CDs.
