Slashdot Mirror
Replacement for Jewel Cases?
PsychoBrat asks: "I'm surrounded by jewel cases at work and at home, and although most of them are still holding together to some extent, a lot of them have either cracked fronts, broken hinges or snapped teeth. Slim cases generally annoy me because I can't tell them apart by looking at their spines, and wallets take too long to sort through. What do you use in place of the standard fragile jewel cases to keep all your discs organized?"
Get one of those nylon cloth book with a thick spline and over 150 plastic pocketed pages that holds 8 CDs each in plain view.
100 Capacity CD-R spindles for the cheap guys, and the huge super-100 capacity cd/dvd binders. You can get a nice binder for $15 these days. Both ways are very efficient and save much more space than jewel cases.
We are but a pixel in the JPEG of life.
Do away with physical storage beyond backups of your library... Ok, thats a little facetious; but it *is* the solution I selected.
As an aside, where the hell did the name "jewel case" come from. Its cheap arse polystyrene with some coloured paper and a lump of polycarbonate and aluminium inside. There is nothing even vaguely jewel-like about it?!!?
err!
jak.
It makes for efficient storage, but when you actually need to find a CD, it's even worse than thin cases or binders, because you have to shuffle through a huge stack of discs to find the one you're looking for...and that's assuming that you know which spindle it's on in the first place.
So...basically, for ease-of-location, spindles are a bad idea.
I feel your pain, man. I've moved several times in the last 5 years and jewel & DVD cases have been big problems for me. Here's a couple of things I've done:
1. Ive purchased a few of those Nylon CD case thingies at Best Buy. Okay, I'm an idjit for not knowing the proper name for them, but hopefully you get the idea. I intentionally bought ones that are very different in design so I could tell them apart. I have a grey one that I keep the DVDs in and a black one for backups. I also have a blue one for some of my PS2/Dreamcast games etc.
2. I have a big hard drive that I've copied a number of the CDs to. Nearly all of my driver and application installs are there and I can just browse to the folder and get it started. I've also downloaded cracks for a few of my games so I could do that as well. (I love how that makes me a pirate even thoug I own the game.) Every year or so I buy a new hard drive and move the data over. Lately I've been using external drives so that this process would be a little more laptop friendly.
Eventually I'm going to rip my DVDs and do the same little trick I mentioned in step 2. I have a DVD +RW DVD burner that my DVD player happily plays, so on movie night I can just get a burn going and play it. (More specifically, start the burn the night before... but you probably get what I mean.)
With hard drives as big as they are these days, physical media is becoming more and more of a nuisance. Netflix is looking awfully good to me right now.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
It depends on two factors:
1) How many CD's there are
2) How often you expect to use them
If there are many CD's, your choices are either thich jewel cases or the circular stacks with the pole in the middle, that come with a bunch of CD's. If you expect to look through them, you should buy the thick jewel cases (or a binder, actually). If you do not, storing them on the large circular things is great, because it does not take up too much space. Essentially, if you want to have it, *just in case*, go with the smallest, least obtrusive method. If you want to use them, then go with something that is easy to look through.
Having said that, I suggest you stop using CD's. Buy a large USB disk, create a backup directory with a bunch of subdirectories, and use that instead. Or even buy an external hard drive for backups. If it's really that important to you, it's worth the cost. Also, consider backing up over a network to another server, as opposed to physical media (or along with physical media).
Just incredible. Over a dozen posts, and not a single person has stated the obvious.
Amaray DVD Cases
They come in regular size and super-slim. You can place artwork inside that covers the front, back, AND spine. If you don't want artwork, you can get them in clear form. They fit on a standard bookshelf. They're made of durable, flexible plastic so they won't wear to anywhere near the same degree as CD cases. They can hold manuals, and other materials on the inside. You can get them in forms that hold multiple disks. Etc., etc., etc.
Basically, they're the nearest thing to a perfect case.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
They are slim cases, but otherwise they are really great: Ejector CD cases. I don't know if they have them in full jewel case width though, probably not, but that's the best I'm aware of.
Something to keep in mind. DVD's need to go into cases made for them. The holes will crack easier on a DVD compared to a CD. Now onto cases. There's the question of any documentation or other material that needs to go with the DVD(s)* BTW you can also get hanging plastic pages that go into file cabinets that hold 4 CDs and CD-size inserts on the back.
*FEAR Directors edition comes with two DVD's on one hub. and two pieces of documentation.
This thing:
http://www.midi-classics.com/h/h26554.htm
Either print the barcode directly on the disc with an inkjet or use the Avery labels for CDs. They even make printable labels that go on the little portion of the CD in the center (not the hole).
I went the no-tech and lazy way. I bought a bunch of the tyvek sleeves. I don't write on the sleeves, but I write directly on the disc with a marker. I throw the CD in any available sleeve, and put it in some reasonable order. I can usually find something quickly, but sometimes it takes a while.
Unless you're some sort of clean-o-maniac who lives for everything to have a place, realize it's a crappy media for storing in bulk and do something that gets you most of what you want. If you take 40 hours over a span of time to organize this stuff are you ever going to recoup that time? I don't know how often I've gone overboard for this stuff.
I use catalogs and cases. For my 1300 data-filled dvds (legitimate backups, honest!) I use a nifty app called SuperCat which lets me browse all of my discs in an explorer-like interface, and is fully searchable. My discs are all in label order, so on average it takes me 30 seconds to find what I'm looking for in SuperCat, find the disc, and get it in the drive. For proper audio CDs or film DVDs, duh, store them alphabetically, in wallets or slimlines, or use another of many available catalog apps.
I used to DJ for a college radio station and I found my CD's would get scratched using a big binder because of tiny bits of dirt would make holes in the data layer from the weight of all the other full CD pages on top of each other.
Now I swear by the Viewpak XG by Univenture (bottom of the page). They are heavy duty vinyl slips with a soft backing for 1 CD/DVD, a slip for the front cover of the album, and a back slip behind the CD for the back cover of the album.
They have packages without the artwork slips if you don't need them.
These things are real slim, robust, and if you need to order alphabetically or whatever, it's very easy to add or subtract from your collection without having to mess with everything (ie, in a binder).
They also sell Storage Boxes that are just the right size for the packs, or course you can just use shoe boxes or home-made wood crates like me.
Univenture has at least one customer for life. Long live physical media!
Shouldn't You expect more from your DJ?
If you have the old caddy-type CD drive, a big pile of caddies is a good storage option. That way you never touch the discs themselves, so avoid the scratches and fingerprints. But those drives are getting hard to find. Personally I got a lot of caddies on ebay, but have had too much trouble with the drives (and besides, SCSI is its own hassle). I also got a rack-mount box with 8 caddy-type drives in it, and my plan was to put a low-end motherboard inside and use Linux to serve up individual NFS and Samba exports; but then I would have to deal with issues like automounting/unmounting on access, and a software eject mechanism that works across the network. I haven't gotten around to it so far. By the time I do, CD's may be obsolete.
I also got an NSM 100-CD jukebox on ebay. It has SCSI for the drive, and RS-232 to control the robot. I managed to find specs for the control protocol on the net, so wrote a program to control it. At one point I had an automount lashup that would automatically load the right disc when it is accessed, but it didn't work quite right, so I was going to reimplement it using FUSE. I haven't gotten around to that project, either.
Nowadays hard drives are just too cheap. Might as well consolidate all those discs in one place.
Inexpensive, biodegradable, and easy. Also helps you rid yourself of the notion that CDs/DVDs are anything more than bits of plastic that somehow merit being displayed on a shelf.
I went through this a couple of years ago. I had just under 2K CDs and spent a few weeks investigating storage alternatives which included everything from the consumer oriented 100-CD display racks for your living room, to large capacity wooden shelving, to painfully expensive specialised office cabinets. Complete waste of time.
Now, everything gets put into a paper window-less sleeve. Each CD gets a number, the relevant info is keyed into a database, and a simple label is applied to the outside of the sleeve. I figure it takes me about 20 seconds for each CD. Compare that to the time and expense of designing/printing/cutting up inserts for jewel cases (slim or otherwise), and you get the idea. If a database isn't your kind of thing, grepping a simple list should work just fine. As a side note, I entertained the idea of printing on the sleeves directly using a LaTeX template, but decided against it and use simple adhesive labels exclusively. Note that I opted for window-less sleeves to avoid having to design and print and insert for each CD.
As for "storing" all the CDs, I just modified a drawer by sectioning it off so that each section would hold exactly 100 CDs. The CDs are stored upright (to protect the CD) and arranged front to back, so finding and retrieving, say, CD number 0983, is quick and easy. Two drawers == 2K CDs. Easily expandable.
As for the old jewel cases, well, they were in mint condition so I gave them to a friend that collects music. Last I heard, he gave them away to a friend of his. I've reclaimed a huge amount of space in my office, and the clutter is gone. I have no "dusting" or similar nonsense to contend with, and made my life is a bit more sane by sticking a few plants on the shelves that were once reserved for CDs. Knowing that my CDs are protected in a cool dry place doesn't hurt, either.
You can buy sleeves directly from any paper manufacturer. There's plenty that offer specialised CD selections that will be happy to sell to you. Alternatively, you can buy a box of 1K from a reseller on eBay for just a few bucks.
As a final note, you may want to investigate something similar ready-made in the form of small metal or plastic boxes that resemble miniature hanging file folders; you can find these in most office-supply stores. The problem I've found with that approach, however, aside from the price, is that each hanging insert is prenumbered (a problem if for large collections) and requires you to squeeze 2 CDs into each. Hardly a safe approach considering how tightly they fit, not to mention that if you remove the entire insert from the box, you'll be carrying around 2 CDs instead of just the one you wanted.
YMMV.
I buy the hard plastic boxes that hold 10 cds each from rima.com, Hard Plastic Box for 10 CDs, 20-Pack. Of course, I put each CD in an individual CD sleeve.
In some cases, I put the device driver CDs together in boxes. In other cases, I'll put the various CDs for a particular CD in a box. And just slap a label on the front.
They take up a whole lot less room than individual cases and are much better at grouping things together.
Library supply houses have a variety of improved
CD cases. Demco (http://www.demco.com) used to
sell polycarbonate ones (i.e., bulletproof glass)
which were fantastic, though expensive,
but don't seem to carry them any more. They do
have a selection of polypropylene ones that are
still better than the usual polystyrene (enter
"cd cases" in their search engine). This
site has links to a few other vendors:
http://www.dansdata.com/discsavers.htm
yes I have a couple at work. The mac discs go in one unit and the pc discs in another.
The database could be much better (it isn't afull borrowing library solution and is MS Access based). I'd just to see them make a model that includes a dvd reader so it could scan the info it without you haven't to use an internal drive - also that would stop you hopefully returning the wrong disc.
The construction is a little suspect - I've had to reset it and had to open it up when it allowed two discs into one slot. Also you can't transport the unit around with discs inside...Still it is better than a bunch of scratched up discs..
I have 'ripped' them to a 250GB USB2 drive.
'Ripped' isn't really the right word. 'Copied' is more accurate. Each track is copied as an uncompressed WAV file. Each CD consumes approx 400mb of disk space. The WAVs are the same bit rate as the CD Audio; Nero will just copy them back without any conversion if I was to burn an audio CD.
The folder structure is as follows:There is also an XML file with all the album info in it including the CDDB query ID in case I need to requery CDDB without needing the actual CD. Additionally both
Why did I do it like this ? I'm lazy. I don't want to re-rip my collection. Ever. As disks get bigger, at some point ~7mb 256k mp3s are going to look tiny. On a good system ($2000 amp + speakers) mp3s DO NOT sound as good as the original CDs. My WAVs however, sound identical.
For my portable mp3 player (see, I'm not totally anti-mp3) I have an ActiveSync-type tool which converts selected albums from the Music Library to 256k mp3s. If I decided I want 384k or even 160k mp3s instead, I can just alter a setting in the tool, and batch re-encode to the player. As part of the mp3 encoding process the folder.jpg album cover is embedded into the mp3 using the IDv2 tag 'APIC' (my mp3 player displays these on screen).
For ripping the CDs originally, I wrote a tool that rips at the max speed of your optical drive. In my system it rips a CD in about 3 minutes. I can run 2 copies of the tool, and have each one ripping from a different drive simultaneously, although I think this saturates the IDE channel, as rip speeds decrease. This tool can also defeat 'most' DRMd CDs (not the latest batch tho).
Overall the system works great, this is the first time I've written up how it all works, so apologies if bits aren't clear. If anyones interested in the tools I use, feel free to contact me.
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
Why not rip to FLAC? Half the size, same quality.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I considered FLAC, but went with WAV because everything can play it, and as a hobbyist coder, WAV is easier to program for (built in APIs in Windows etc).
As the code is mostly my own, I can always update and convert the master library at a later date. So if FLAC or Lossless WMA (LOL!) becomes a better standard, I'll switch to that.
What I forgot to mention was the complete app list and it's dependencies.
Ripper: My Own Tool, CDRipper.EXE
-Querys CDDB
-Querys Amazons XML feed
-Uses Windows API for CDA control and track ripping
-Can run 'hands free', pops the drive tray when done, plays a sound, waits for new cd.
mp3Encoder: My Own Tool, MusicSync.EXE
-Internal code to work out what to sync.
-uses cmd line encoder (LAME at the moment*) to create mp3s
-uses AudioGenie.OCX (google it) to embed ID3 tags including APIC
(*I'm looking for a command line WMA encoder - does anyone know of one?)
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howt o/articles/AutomatingEncoding.aspx
That's microsofts page on how to batch windows media 9 encoding.
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
I use different colored paper sleeves. Those packs of 50 in 5 colors from Memorex are great and disposable
Paper is made of wood fibers and will scratch CD and DVD coatings. If you keep discs in paper sleeves you can end up "fogging" the disc with micro-scratches to the point where it won't be readable anymore, at least not without being repaired by something like this. (Just for reference I have had great results from that particular unit, and it doesn't leave radial lines like the "Skip Dr." units.)
Instead of paper sleeves, use non-scratching Tyvek (the same stuff they put on houses):
Pack of 100
Pack of 1,000
Just to stay totally on topic, the original poster may want to check out the complete Cyberguys catalog. They have a large number of different CD/DVD holder/case options, from quad CD jewel cases to CD/DVD carousels and other alternative storage possibilities. (Note this part of the quad CD jewel case description: "The durable, translucent polypropylene case will not break or shatter like ordinary plastic jewel cases". Interesting.) Something like this may actually be what the original submitter is looking for. No breakage and saves space but still has a readable index to make it easy to find things.
Cyberguys' prices are great on almost everything in their inventory and they have tons of "neato" geeky items that always make me wish I had more money. For basic computer items like network cables, adapters, cases of various types, testers and such, they have become my supplier of choice. For bigger stuff like hard drives, CD/DVD burners, monitors and such I still go to Newegg though. No, I don't work for them or get any kickbacks for the links, unfortunately.
After almost loosing (TWICE) my entire ripped CD collection (EAC Secure TEST/COPY into FLAC), I finally really heard what I had been told over and over but never believed.
RAID IS NOT BACKUP!
If you think having a parity drive makes your data safe, you WILL regret it. Even RAID1 won't save you when your power supply fails violently trashing multiple drives.
My solution? I built up a new RAID server with higher capacity drives, and leave the original server turned off as a mirror that I sync once every month or two. I occasionally compare every file to ensure no data corruption. It takes days to compare terabytes over a LAN, but then I know ahead of time about bad/failing hardware.