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CD Organizing Devices?
Dagian asks: "Like many of you, I have CD's coming out of every orifice in my office. I have been looking for some time for a device to store my collection of software, music and other assorted goodies. The standard faux-leather CD binders seem inadequate. Have any of you come across anything that will organize CD's and - most of all - make them easy to tote around?" The traditional CD wallets work fine when you are talking in lots of 10-15, but what about lots of 20? 50? 100? CD Organization can get hard when the numbers get large. So, big or small, what portable carrying objects do you use when organizing CDs?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CDs.
It depends how frequently you used the CDs. Also, if you're toting them around to different computers on the same netowork, or you need constant access to many different CDs, check out: dvdchanger.com these 200 disk CD/DVD changers range from $1000 to $6000. The things are REALLY cool, go check out the specs (anyone know how to build your own?)
If you're wooking for a CD wallet sorta thing, check out: Case Logic Nylon Case We use these at my work, we have well over 1000 CDs stored in these things. They work beautifully.
It is portable but only in the army sense that it can be moved by 3 men or a jeep.
It seams to me that what you need is something portable, with a couple hundred gig storage, ethernet interface, that can connect to a PC and let you burn a CD on demand. (or have a build in burner... hmm).
You could've hired me.
Maybe I'm not as stylish and fashionable as the next guy... I just ditch all cases and have got three nails in a piece of wood which I stick CDs on. Works quite well :) Only problem is getting the bottom one out...
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
grip + a 40GB hard drive. carries a couple hundred CDs, no problem. ;)
Indie rock lives! b-side!
I find that the standard Case Logic nylon cases to be the perfect balance of portability, density, protection, and durability. I have three of the 208-disc capacity models. (The 256 and 264 models are a little too bulky for me.) The faux-leather ones just seem a little weird for my tastes, and any hard-shelled cases I've seen seem too prone to breakage.
They hold liner notes well, but of course that halves the capacity, but I find it worth it. The one that holds my CD-ROMs has just discs in it, though.
Ian
I've seen wooden CD shelves that hold maybe 100-150 CDs and cases. I'd guess they're about 11" high, 20" long and 6" deep, and hold the CDs in two rows. They're fairly cheap (cheaper if you make your own) and they stack well. You could probably rig up some sort of net system to keep the CDs from falling out of the shelves while travelling (a couple of big elastic straps staple-gunned to the wood should be enough if you're not concerned with aesthetics). The downsides would be the huge size and excessive weight, and the fact that the only portability solution that I know of is a hack of sorts.
I know you said that the CD binders were inadequate, but they kick ass for portability. Unless you've got 1000 CDs that you need to browse really quickly, a large binder or two would probably be the best choice.
I have developed my own system for storing CDs. I call it Huge-Pile-On-Desk(tm). It works like a sort of buffer that will distribute itself to Huge-Pile-On-Floor(tm) if I try to store too many CD's at a time. Also, if I want one of the CDs in the bottom, the rest of the CDs spread out so I can get a better view, making it easier to find the right CD. Feel free to use it.
Stop collecting so much useless shit. Do you really need to carry 200, 300 CDs of music/data with you everywhere you go? Does it match your PDA, cell phone, CD-MP3 player, WinCE device, Bluetooth network, and WAPt that you have strapped to your belt, not to mention the notebook computer and portable 3D milling machine?
If you really need to carry around that much stuff, then you have become a slave to the technology that is supposed to serve you. Go outside with a pen and paper and write down your thoughts. If it weren't so easy to type, maybe we wouldn't have so much dross proving Sturgeon's point.
Make the technology serve you. Don't just consume, buy, and store. Produce, reduce, and invite elegance. When you feel lost, pull out that 50 franc note (RIP 2002) and try to be more like Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
I keep most of mine in 50-disc cakeboxes that the blanks came in. The CDs I use often are in small (8-64 disc) CaseLogic and other cases.
I love in the police log in the news paper, you see the reports of "400 cd's stolen from car"
I could drive across the united states and not listen to 400 fucking cd's
But still an interesting product.
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http://www.kdsusa.com/consumerproducts/CDorganize
Laserline makes a nice system called Media Zone that stores your CDs in little rigid plastic sleaves that can be inserted into a folder type carrier, a desk top organizer, or just carried around by themselves. I find they're a little more expensive and harder to find that your average folder holder, but you can buy them on the laserline website
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
It's not a matter of carrying a bunch of sh*t around. SysAdmins/Consultants naturally have a variety of software that they must carry around from job-site to job-site. I don't know how many times I've been off-site and wished I had a specific CD that is back on my desk under a pile of work. I wish the HD in my laptop was big enough to hold all of that data. As far as the road-trip goes. It's all about variety. I may not listen to them all, but it's nice to know that if I get an itch to listen to some Dream Theater, I have the option. *grin*
I have one of these and love it:
CD3 Selector
*** On the Internet, no one knows you're using a VIC-20
I have given thought to this - it is feasible to homebrew such a system (and if anyone does, let me know about it - I would love to see pics!).
/dev/cdrom or something.
Basically, for an easy to build system, you want the CD-ROM or RW drive to travel vertically - so you set up some kind of elevator/trolly system, controlled by a stepper motor, along with some kind of pulse sensor (optical encoder) along the track the drive is travelling on so you know how far up or down the track you are. Opposite the CD drive track, you need to have some kind of disk holding system, which will hold the disks horizontally.
Now, all you do is raise the drive to the proper spot just below the disk, eject the tray, lift the disk up, then "inject" the tray. Perform your operations (reading/writing), then eject the disk, drop down a bit (to mount the disk back in its holding "slot"), then "inject" the tray and move to the next selected disk.
For this to work, you would have to modify the tray to look kinda like a forklift - by cutting away (break out the Dremel!) the front center portion of the tray.
Issues you will run into: 1) Weight of CD drive - remove as much of the covering as possible - this will eliminate a ton of weight. 2) Cable length - you may have to use SCSI for this to have any hope of working - it would probably be better to use one of those ultra small motherboards, and mount it to the drive and have it travel with the drive. 3) Control - you will probably have to create a custom control system hooked up to the parallel port or similar to drive the thing. 4) Software - oh, yeah - that part: if done right, this thing could be running linux and almost be like a funky samba server or ftp server - send a command to get a certain disk, and that disk would be mounted as
Regarding CD binder pages - these can be pretty cheap - go down to office max or staples, and buy several packs of these, and a few cheap binders. Keep liner notes/manuals in one binder, CDs in the others. Most of the time you won't need the liner notes, but when you do, they'll be handy.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
My favourite method *for CD-ROMS only* is 3-hole binder sheets. They hold four per side. They're a little pricey, but they aren't faux leather (gag), they fit on a shelf, you can use the same methods of organization as you do with all your other binders... hopefully the price will come down, but I find them the best solution.
Of course, for music cd's, I just keep them in their cases. I have too much music that comes in special cases (ie. not jewel cases)--where you can't just take out the insert. Plus I like to browse my collection on a shelf, standing up--don't ask me why.
It seems most of my need for CD's was because of windows - Linux never seems to need CD's more than once.
So for windows, I found that CDSpace works great. (it's awesome for laptops)
It's an application that creates a virtual CDrom drive. Your hardware cdrom becomes your E: drive and a virtual cdrom appears as your D: drive. When you first get a game cd, etc.. just pop it in your E: drive and scan it in. Then you "insert" the scanned CD image into your virtual D: drive and the system recognizes it just like a regular CD was inserted. It will autoplay and everything.
There are a couple of options to take into account various media types. Regular cd images are just encoded directly. Music CD's can be encoded or converted to different sound types. Game CD's are encoded with extra error information so that the copy protection scheme still works (I've never had a game cd fail to work). You can also add compression so that the image on disk is smaller.
So I use my CD's one time - to scan them in - then put them away. Then I insert the image in the virtual cd drive when necessary. Oh, and I got a 60gb drive - then space was never a problem.
Wait until you hear Dream Theater's upcoming album "Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence"... I've been listening to the 4-track promo "Four Degrees Of Radio Edits" for the last three days and it rules. :-)
Sorry for the off-topic post.
Mark Bredius
http://www.dreamtheater.net/