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?"

Comments

Spindles!

[Chrismith]

Personally, I use CD-R spindles...the big ones can hold 50 or 100 discs each. Sometimes more if you take out those little foam things they use as padding.

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.

as cheap as a piece of paper

[shack420]

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

[hahafaha]

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).

Re:Rip them all??

[CRCulver]

From Wikipedia:

Origin of the name: the case does not derive in any way from containers for jewelry. Instead, the name apparently originates from watchmakers' use of the term jewel to refer generally to a polished hemispherical bearing used in a mechanism (high-quality mechanical watches and clocks commonly use gemstones, typically rubies, for such bearings because of their low friction properties). A jewel case has two moulded hemispherical plastic bearings, in its hinges, hence the use of the term "jewel".

Paper

[value_added]

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.