Re: Reducing music collection space requirements

On Dec 23, 11:11 pm, John Byrns <byr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<736917f9-36e9-4f4d-843a-f7f957ef2...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Andre Jute <fiul...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John Byrns <byr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Andre Jute <fiul...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I used to keep my CDs standing on end in precisely right-size
cardboard boxes (US: cartons) that supermarkets get their vegetables
and fruit delivered in, with lips and indents for stacking. But
250-300 CDs per box weigh a lot when they are stacked to the ceiling
and you want a disc from the bottommost box. Woulda been even heavier
if I ever got around to making the wooden boxes I intended... Then I
saw big books of CD disc pockets at a department store and bought
their entire stock for a few hundred euro. The books each have enough
pockets to hold up to 250 discs, booklets, and so on. A full book
takes up only three inches of bookshelf space and, while heavy, is
nowhere near as heavy as a big box full of CD disc cases and
extraneous paperwork, nor as awkward to handle.

How on earth do they fit 250 CDs & booklets in a book only 3 inches
thick? Assuming the book is 2 CDs deep and three high, a pretty large
book, that would be 40 CDs thick, or nearly 14 CDs per inch, which seems
a bit much when considering that the book needs covers and internal
pockets for the CDs.

Embarrassingly, you're right. My Bach CDs, many of them accompanied by
thick texts in several languages, take up two of these books plus
another stack of discs not yet inserted in leaves that will probably
fill another book.

The books are made of doublesided leaves with four pockets to a side,
arranged two by two, eight discs per leaf. They're supplied 30 leaves
per book, thus potentially 240 discs per book. The leaves are triple-
punched at the back and surplus leaves are removable.

With eight bare CD's in it, no paper whatsoever, measured with vernier
calipers, each page is pressed flat is a minimum of 3mm thick. Forty
sheets would be 120mm, including the covers definitely well over 5
inches; it would bulge untidily and not shelve neatly.

I finally got around to getting out my micrometer and measuring one of
the "CD books" I have. This is a smaller book with one CD on each side
of a leaf. The thickness of a leaf with two CDs in it measured as 0.12
inches and coincidently the covers also measured 0.12 inches thick.

That a hairbreadth over 3mm, same as I measured.

That means that a 3 inch thick book could hold 23 leaves plus the two
covers. With a 2 x 2 arrangement as with your book that would be a
capacity of 184 CDs in three inches,

Never happen. At least some paper must be stored with each CD,
otherwise you will be casting around on the internet for track and
performer details or the often useful or interesting sleeve notes. I
think I'll be happy to house 120 discs per book with associated
paperwork. That's half the 240 discs advertised as bare disc capacity
by the makers of the book, who didn't claim it would fit in 3 inches
-- that is my requirement so that the books stand up straight on the
shelf and fit neatly together, which they won't if they bulge because
they are overstuffed. Even at double the original calculated shelf
space, it is still a massive saving of space and weight over the old
system in flat boxes each holding around 300 CDs in their cases. And
so much more convenient.

or a taller book with a 2 x 3
arrangement could hold 276 CDs.

A taller book would need special shelves. The 2 x 2 book fits onto a
standard 14in high shelf for large format books. This is important to
me as I buy my shelves in flatpacks to a standard format.

[snip]

It takes a minute or two cracking open the plastic disc case to get
the cover and track list out and put them in the pocket, and that box
of Bach, not quite finished, consumed two days to pocket. I'm starting
to understand why so many audiophiles have miserably small music
collections: LPs and CDs demand time better spent on hardware.

I don't know that the time would be better spent on hardware, I often
wish I had built up my music collection more when I was young, rather
than concentrating on hardware as I did, As a result I had to work
harder on building my music collection later, but there is a lot of good
stuff that was available in the old days but which was hard to find, or
even non existent, more recently.

The truth is, my CD collection was just about nil on the day I decided
I was out of vinyl because it was too inconvenient; on that day I
didn't even have a tabletop CD player, only a Sony Discman. I built up
a collection of over 6000 discs in six or seven years by acquiring
almost everything that appeared new and in reissue and then weeding
back the incompetent and the unimaginative. It is consequently a wider
collection than my LP collection of about 8000 discs which was built
up over a period thirty odd years by much more rigorous standards.
Then, when too many duplicates started appearing, I simply stopped
adding to the collection because I had at least one recording of every
important piece of music, and of course often several recordings if
significantly different interpretations were available. For instance,
I have two or three box sets of the complete Mozart piano concertos by
players I consider both outstanding and consistent, as well as loose
discs of high points by other artists; ditto for the Mozart piano
sonatas. I think nothing of playing the Mozart piano sonatas straight
through, or the Bach Cantatas (I'm currently on the Ton Koopman
version of the Bach Cantatas). There are of course discs that hardly
ever get played but I keep them for lending out because a collection
like mine is resource for the top level of the musical community. If a
scholar wants to know what Rosa Ponselle sounded like, I have a good
quality rerecording (made by playing a wax cylinder into a horn and
cutting to CD at the thin end of the horn); if a pianist wants an
interpretation of an obscure Liszt paraphrase to play as an encore, I
have much of the Liszt piano music. I have on more than one occasion
had a world famous performer drop in to ask me if they could have my
copy of their performance of XYZ that was now out of print, and of
which they have long since given away their own last copy; of course I
always say yes.

That reminds me, every Christmas I play the Beethoven Symphonies in
the Liszt transcription for piano, recorded by Leslie Howard. Excuse
me while I get down the L box.

Unfortunately the prizewinning Classical Jukebox, about ten thousand
pages of my music reviews, interviews with performers and composers
and impresario, and so on, was lost when the forgeries of the
Magnequest Scum caused my IP to close down my old netsite. It would be
several years of work to reformat all those pages to suit my new site,
so only a few articles have been republished on my new site at:
http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/CLASSICAL%20JUKEBOX.html
Music lovers frustrated in their search for remembered favourite
reviews and guidelines are encouraged every Christmas to make a wax
doll of Michael LeFevre of Magnequest Transformers and stick pins into
its mouth, wishing Creepy Mike root canal treatment every day of his
life as a punishment for his greed.

Regards,

John Byrns

--
Surf my web pages at, http://fmamradios.com/

Good golly, the Leslie Howard set of the Liszt transcriptions of the
Beethoven symphonies are held together with an elastic band because
the CD box, a complicated construction to hold five discs and a
booklet without a slipcase, is pretty broken from use. Perhaps my
Liszt box should be the next one "booked".

Andre Jute
There are three explanations of the infinite and the inexplicable:
religion, mathematics and music. Only Johann Sebastian Bach fused all
three perfectly, and that is why he is the greatest composer who ever
lived. -- Andre Jute, Ruskin, Oxford, c1978

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