Who said record collecting isn't dangerous?

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At about 11.30 last night, me and my wife were just about to lay down for some well deserved shut eye (we are currently sleeping on a mattress in the living room as we are in the middle of re plastering the bedroom) When a shelf containing upwards of 400 cds collapsed on top of us.

I escaped pretty much unscathed but my wife who received the full force of the avalance has a bump on her head and some pretty nasty cuts and bruises on her arm.

Is this a warning to us to cut down on our music buying or just dodgy carpentry? is there any record of people being crushed to death under their own record collections?

Can anyone recommend a storage system for cds (we currently have about 900 but the collection has been growing at a rate of 15 to 20 per month) which doesn't consist of those metal toast rack type thingies and will not require a secong mortgage?

― Kris England., Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

throw away your boxes and stack the cds in nice semi transparent colums...

― jk, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

My advice is: don't sleep beneath the record collection. My own is on shelves that my dad made himself, above a book shelf with the sofa underneath, so extra safe.

― Anna Rose, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Thanks Anna, any chance you could ask your dad to make us some? Interestingly, the only cd which didn't actually crash to the ground was "Fight the power" cd single by Public Enemy which was caught, miracle like betweeen two sections of speaker wire.

Is this significant?

― Kris England, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

At least it wasn't vinyl. Those suckas are heavy.

BTW, is there a thread around here asking how big peoples music collections are?

I've got too many and always wonder how many others have.

― earlnash, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I ditched the jewel cases years ago - sick of those lil bastards breaking... Went to CaseLogic books for awhile & then to three daisychained 300 CD Changers for the most-often played & kept the books for the less-often played.

My mother-in-law put her husbands vinyl collection into an armoire & it exploded - records & splinters everywhere.... But then she gave it to me (said I could have it if I could fix it) - fixed it - looks great. I don't put records in it.

― Dave225, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: PINE CRATES. (or milk crates)

― Sean Carruthers, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I had a carpenter friend build wooden shelving units & attach them to the wall. Each one holds about 750 CDs. I am a little ashamed to admit how many of them I have.

― Douglas, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

That'll be 1 then.

― Kris England, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

― o. nate, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I know what you're saying there and I do have quite a lot of stuff on my hard drive but I have not yet been able to find a P.C. with sound quality to match my Hi-Fi system.

I'm sure 10 years from now we'll all be doing that but..

― Kris England, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Is this a warning to us to cut down on our music buying or just dodgy carpentry?
choice b) Dodgy carpentry.

― Lord Custos v2.3, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I reccomend harshly cullling the things you haven't listened to in over a year and selling them off to people who don't rent their homes. You use the proceeds to buy more music, unitl eventually you have an amorphous beast that changes shape every two years or so. I reccomend this. i haven't really managed to do it.

― Andrew, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Let's see: 900 CDs x 74 min/CD x 60 sec/min x 128 kbits/sec x 1/8 bit/byte x 1/1000000 kb/GB = 63.9 GB So in other words you could fit your entire CD collection on an 80 gig hard drive with plenty of room left over for new purchases.

Just out of curiosity -- does this appeal to y'all? The idea that all your music is on your computer and you just click through your albums to select something? To me it sounds awful, having to look at a computer monitor every time I wanted to hear a record. Maybe I'm old school (or just old).

― Mark, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Just out of curiosity -- does this appeal to y'all?

NO.

― Andy K, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Unfortunately the non-computer-based options for listening to MP3's are currently kind of limited. If you're a real techno geek, you could maybe build your own MP3 player with a spare hard-drive, CPU, and soundcard. There must be something out on the market like this. For now you'd have to settle for connecting your computer's soundcard to your stereo system, or getting an adapter for the headphone jack on your portable MP3 player, or you could burn your MP3's on CD and get one of the CD players that plays MP3s, but that kind of defeats the purpose of putting them all on a hard-drive.

― o. nate, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Apparently, there are a few MP3 stereo components available on the market now of the kind I was envisioning. See this link if you're interested.

http://www.mp 3newswire.net/stories/2002/mpst.html

― o. nate, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Just having MP3s on a hard drive really doesn't appeal to me, and I'm really geeky. I tried it for a few months when I got a 20 GB harddrive, but I gave up, and just keep a few GBs of my favorite songs on my laptop now.

After our earthquake, the drawbacks to storing CDs on walls became pretty clear to me- I'm thankful I wasn't home. Now I have a little 3 foot tall cabinet with drawers for CDs that I keep on the floor next to my armchair. The only drawback is that I can never keep it organized in any kind of scheme, so unless I remember which drawer I put a CD back in, I have to hunt through all of them. But that's mostly due to my complete lack of alphabetization skills.

― lyra in seattle, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

My dad's doing this - putting all his fucking musick on his hard drive. I don't fucking care about it though. It just doesn't appeal to me. I wanna hold the record, shove it in my stereo and play it. And anyway that would mean you ALWAYS need to be around yer comp if you wanna play yer music. Fuck that.

― nathalie - who's had a fucking abysmal day so pardon my fucking language, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Lyra, the earthquake occurred on my last day working at Seattle Weekly. I slept on a mattress in the middle of a pretty large bedroom on top of a pottery-supply warehouse south of Pioneer Square, and I had four store-bought shelving units (holding about 550 CDs apiece), one stack of two to the bed's right and one stack across from it. essentially, the top shelf next to the bed fell down and shattered a number of cases (and four or five discs), but most of them were remarkably unscathed. I just shudder to think what would have happened had the same thing happened with the shelves across from me; my legs would probably have been broken.

― M Matos, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

''Just out of curiosity -- does this appeal to y'all? The idea that all your music is on your computer and you just click through your albums to select something? To me it sounds awful, having to look at a computer monitor every time I wanted to hear a record. Maybe I'm old school (or just old).''

Definetely, old man. I'm starting to fill up my shelf with CDs. I'll have to start putting them under the bed so actually storing it on a computer would be ideal . The problem would be the speakers. I would want to connect my computer to the my hi-fi spaekers so I can get good sound. You don't have to look at the monitor. Besides, when you play music don't you look at the equalizer, anyway?

― Julio Desouza, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Andrew's suggestion is exactly what I do every so often. I had a big purge a couple of weeks back of about 150 CDs. There is a proprietor store that I bought tons of music off of back in college and I make a pilgrimage every year or so to trade. He gives me quite a better deal than any other store, as I have been a customer for years.

The best part is leaving with a big stack of new things to give a listen.

― earlnash, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I know what you're saying there and I do have quite a lot of stuff on my hard drive but I have not yet been able to find a P.C. with sound quality to match my Hi-Fi system.
http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/2041/106/store.apple.com/C atalog/US/Images/soundsticks_150.jpg

― nathalie, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I don't like Andrew's suggestion, because I always get ripped off. As for mp3s I burn them onto normal audio cds, and have them in case logics, but I still have too many on my computer. I'm out of memory. As for records, I have them stacked somewhere, and cds: I keep about 300 under my desk where my feet would go, sides up so I can look down and find what I want. I keep the rest in large plastic bread crates I stole from a bakery which fit about 400 and some books, but they are hard to carry cds and thier cases get very heavy, and it's wide and tips sometimes.

― A Nairn, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Clarke B. once memorably termed my monstrous collection 'the Raggettstacks,' which is actually pretty damn accurate. I have one big one close to my bed but not facing it (if it fell, it would fall forward), though there are a couple to the side that could cause me a bit of distress). Such are the concerns of space planning.

At 5000 or so CDs, I'd *really* need a huge hard drive to hold everything in the pre-existing sound quality level, so I hope for memory prices to keep collapsing.

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 18 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The other problem with keeping cds in boxes is the fact that the crime problem in my area due to heroin adddiction is so bad that burglaries are occurring on a daily basis and storing my cds in this way would merely provide any opportunist with ready made "carry outs"

I don't have to worry about the vinyl as, although the collection is worth many times the amount of the cd collection, no one ever bothers stealing records.

Not easy to sell to hooded men in pubs I presume.

― Kris England, Wednesday, 19 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

At 5000 or so CDs
Can you imagine ripping 5,000 CDs to a hard drive? How long would that take?

― Mark, Wednesday, 19 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

― Sean Carruthers, Wednesday, 19 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Ikea 'Sten' shelving. Looks like crap, carries half a ton on each shelf. I got buried under the CD collection once myself as our bed was surrounded on three sides by blocks of them. Not so bad, its the 20,000 demo tapes and the 17 years of fanzines that i'm really scared of (hang on, it's 11,000 now since The Cull). Putting the buggers back in alphabetical order was the hard bit (kept stopping to play the things)

― marinecreature, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

If we assumed a figure of 75MB per CD encoded at 128kbps (of course, it varies, especially if you up the bitrate), that's a 375GB hard drive right there. Which means multiples drives at this point, realistically. -- not to mention the time involved w/ the ripping. If Ned just spent 8 hours a day for a year ripping those CDs, music listening would be so much more convenient.

― Mark, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

First thing I do when I bring new CDs home now is to rip them, that way I don't have to go on a marathon later. The odd thing is that I'm going on more about MP3s on this thread than on the storage/display aspect of music, and since I'm a package freak you'd think I'd care more about that. (ie. no matter how convenient I find MP3 for carrying my collection to and from work, I'd never lose the actual collection in favour of the hard drive.) I really should take a picture of the pine crates, and post it here...I'm really surprised at how well it all turned out; it's certainly a lot nicer than the milk crate solution I had before, and certainly still keeps the modularity intact for those times when I have to, y'know, move.

― Sean Carruthers, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

At 5000 or so CDs

Are there really 5000 CDs worth owning?

― Ollee, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I recently started to rethink the rate at which I was purchasing music (2 cds per week, which is hardly extreme but still too much), and I purged my entire cd collection. Now I only had 400 some cds, but it was still simply too much music to listen to. Since April, I've sold 150 or so cds to record stores, friends, and given some away for free. I'm trying to be more judicious with my cd buying, and it's working out well. So you might want to think about getting rid of some that really don't mean much to you. I' mhappy with the decision I made because I have a nice compact collection of things I like a lot and not a bunch of cds that a. I was keeping just for show b. felt guilty about not listening to enough c. just didn't care about. This may sound cold, but it worked for me.

― John S., Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Are there really 5000 CDs worth owning?
Of course. 5000 copies of No New York.

― nathalie, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Can you imagine ripping 5,000 CDs to a hard drive? How long would that take?

WANTED/FOR HIRE: Fast and reliable CD ripper. Must be able to use Macs. Must enjoy being chained to bedroom as working environment. Must be able to tolerate large Star Wars and Cure posters. Preferrably SMBVLF. Free DVD and CD usages, fun, food, music, company, LURV!

― Brian MacDonald, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Are there really 5000 CDs worth owning?

The complete discographies of Miles Davis, Sun City Girls, and John Zorn are roughly half that.

― Kate Spiren, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Preferrably SMBVLF

Personally I think this is the most brilliant part of the post. Yay Brian! :-)

And of course there are that many, as Kate implies. ;-)

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I always rip CDs straight away cos I have a recent history of scratching/tearing/denting the things to unplayability. (although my main CD player (an early Sony DVD player) can't play CDR's, so I can't make direct replacements.

120GB Hard disks cost $150, which isn't that bad compared to the cost of the CDs, and 3 of them (and probably a cheap IDE card, or Ned's Cube would need firewire drives) should cover it. Say it takes 8 minutes to rip a CD (= my experience on Apple iTunes and Windows Media Player, though not on high-end computers, please don't start an argument) = 40000 minutes => 80 eight hour days if that. Peasy

(my collection took about 2 weeks to rip to ~9GB, bah)

― Graham, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

(Oh and I don't enjoy listening to things on my computer, even connected to my stereo, but I'm still too lazy to find CDs)

― Graham, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The slight problem with all these otherwise useful situations is that if I did put everything on hard-drive, I'd still need to wire up my proper sound system to it so I could enjoy the full effect. Which isn't all that hard, I grant, but I've been too lazy to determine the best approach.

As it is, my primary concern is getting an iPod before my NZ trip.

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I have just walked into uni in order to deposit the 250-odd CD's I have bought since arriving here in the radio station. Carried them on my back all the way...

Ow.

― Mr Swygart, Friday, 21 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Are there really 5000 CDs worth owning?

You're not a Sun Ra fan, then?

― Martin Skidmore, Friday, 21 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

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