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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?"
they make cases for these things?!?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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.
what it's for. If it's DVDs for the kids it goes in a folder. If it's essential backups they go in hard cases. If it's one of the zillions of other backups I make I simply title them, date them, and drop them right back on a spare spindle. They take up less space, they are as protected as any other method, and I know before hand that chances are I wont ever need to look at them again, but just in case, I've got them.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
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)
http://www.papercdcase.com/images/cd.pdf Can knock em out in 30 seconds once you get the hang of it. Good for mailing and scratch protection, maybe not so great for rough environments.
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).
I think it helps to think about this problem and identify some basic constraints:
1. You want to organize a great number of physical items. This means you simply need a proportional amount of space, unless you use a more efficient (i.e. physical volume per byte) storage medium
2. You want a system that allows for easy access and identification of these items. This will require even more space, unless you offload access and/or identification to magical computer land.
Just writing those two things out has led me to think of a number of possible solutions outside grappling for some magical panacea to CD storage:
As for constraint #1, consider buying a hard-drive and migrating CD contents to the drive.
As for constraint #2, there are a couple of ways to go. You could buy/build some sort of system that stores and retrieves CDs for you. Then you wouldn't need a bulky jewel case, just a bar code. In a similar but simpler vein, just make a database of all your CDs. There is a surprising amount of information present in the cases, which is why you want full view of them. But get that information in a database and you can use a simple UID to identify CDs. Then you can store CDs in small cases or even a binder.
In fact, if you go to a UID system, you can put all your CDs in one of those big binders. If you keep them ordered by UID then you can access via binary search -- get your big O down to log(n)!
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.
From Wikipedia:
I'm in the process of disposing of all my CDs as everything I need is safe on my RAID5 back-up server.
To find anything just required a quick search function. If the item is an audio CD ripped to FLAC then I que it up, if the item is an data CD then I mount the image file... My storage space has reduced from several large bookshelves full of CDs down to one small box... As for power consumption, I live in a cold sub-zero-celcius environment and any extra heating is welcome!!!
Does it go on forever?
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.
Interesting. I just created a Vmware virtual ISO/CD Server appliance that will share (21) ISOs as drives E -> Y out of the box. (Linux host and Win2k guest.)
:)
He could copy all his stuff to HD, run mkisofs, turn off all the CDROMs, and save a bundle on electricity + wear and tear.
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I sometimes wonder what would happen to his house if someone sent him an email virus that caused all his computers to attempt to calculate the last digit of pi. Would his sound cards start singing "Daisy, Daisy"? Would some of the old boxes emit puffs of smoke and a few showers of sparks?
Actually, I might suggest he install a flashpan with a few serial-port-ignited pyrotechnic charges, just to wake up the gullible non-geeky visitors. Tuck it all behind a CD-ROM faceplate designed to blow open on detonation, that sort of thing.
John
It's kind of surprising, but the cost of storage per disc can be less by storing them in a carousel cd-changer than in any shelf designed to hold cds (or any other shelf for that matter). For a long time I had two, both capable of holding 400+ discs. Each player cost less than $250, and for shelves capable of holding that many cds I found those to be typically more expensive. Kind of weird, but true.
And, even though you may not be playing discs anymore (assuming you tote your music around as mp3 or some other non-cd format), these carousel players typically support display information about each disk (though mine required typing the info in via a keyboard), so you can easily get to specific discs.
I don't know if these changers are still made, but I'm betting you can find them on ebay for an even better price anyway.