Own 1,000 CDs

Why do I even feel the need of having that many anyway? To be honest, I download music instead, and if I really REALLY like the album, I copy it to a cd.
I changed this goal into “listen to 1,000 albums” instead.

I’m gonna count my cd’s soon, just to find out how many they are and how many there’s left to 1000.

Years ago, someone broke into my apartment and stole about two or three-hundred (they must have made a few trips!) of my CD’s. Oddly, they left about fifteen of them, which appeared to be more-or-less randomly chosen. The thing that astonished me is that it was about 80% Classical, 15% Jazz, 5% other—not the kind of collection you would imagine appealing to the break-and-enter types.

Since then, I’ve been rebuilding my collection over the years, and I’m certain I’ve surpasses the 1000 marker. This is a great goal to work toward, I guess, and this music has enriched my life tremendously, but the damn thing is, there’s basically no room for all my CD’s. Many of them are in the closet, and haven’t been out to visit for years. I’ve looked at shelves and things (I recently moved to Pittsburgh for grad school), but short of bespeaking something from a carpenter, which is out of my budget, I haven’t found anything suitable.

Some people have recommended various solutions, most of which somehow involve mp3’s-sorry millennials, but I’m not into mp3’s. First of all, I don’t have that kind of time to kill, and secondly, they just don’t sound as good as WAV or AIMM files, and those take up a lot of space—especially 1000+ discs worth.

Anyway, collect on!

I haven’t really counted all my cd’s yet, but I’m sure that I’m not even halfway to 1,000.

It took me several months doing about 20 at a time, but now I can quickly access all I own and drop them onto my iPod and listen to them at my leisure.

top tip: Rip them at the best bitrate you can but copy them to your iPod with AnaPod:
http://www.redchairsoftware.com/anapod/

It supports on the fly transcoding so you can reduce the bitrate as you copy to your iPod – you don’t need the quality unless your headphones cost more than your iPod :) but you get to cram a lot more onto it. Now I always have plenty to choose from, but I still can’t fit my entire collection on a 30GB iPod – perhaps on an 80, but I don’t really need all my music there as long as I can get to it on my PC.

I counted last night, found out I have 412 CDs, and realized that I have no interest in owning nearly 600 more.

I’ve done a good job of curbing my spending on CDs over the past few months, but right now I’ve got five more on the way from Amazon. And I just realized that I have no idea how many I own at this point.

And then there’s the question of whether Dan’s CDs count toward my total. He doesn’t have nearly as many as I do, but about half of his are currently shelved with mine. (The other half don’t get to live on my shelves because he threw out the original cases and tray liners, and the idea of polluting the shelves with a bunch of blank-spined jewel cases is deeply upsetting to me. Yes, I have some latent obsessive-compulsive tendencies.)

I don’t care as much as I used to about owning vast quanities of CDs, but I still prefer to own physical objects rather than download my music.