Some ?'s. How many recordings do you own? Inventory them?..

Arrange them in any odd ball way?

I created an excel worksheet to inventory my recordings, and did so after I had already acquired many of them. So, I spent hours inputing the information. I was pretty diligent about entering new purchases into the schedule - entered them before I took the plastic off - up until around 2000. After that it was pretty much hit and miss. (At one point, I thought I had lost the inventory file and almost had a stroke.) My employment history has been a bit spotty over the last 5 years, so my purchases slowed down.

According to my spreadsheet, I have around 500 recordings, excluding pop/rock/folk stuff. Of the 500, around 250 are opera recordings and 50 are 'extracts' of an opera's better known arias.(I include oratorios in this category.)

Awhile back, I bought a nice wooden CD unit which probably holds about 300 regular CDs,but less opera recordings because of their multiple disks and boxes. I also a CD unit which has shelves on both sides (it pivots around.) Faced with moving the CDs that I had at the time, I went thru various machinations of how to organize them, especially the operas. Alphabetical by composer. Alphabetical by title etc. I decided to organize them by composer. Then I decided that they should be organized ethnically lol. The Italians got the honor of the nice unit with the glass doors, since after all, it's their medium.(I included the French with them, but have very few operas by French composers.) I managed to get all but a few into the unit. Then I had to decide how to organize the others in the rotating unit. Should the Russians come before the Germans? Who should be on the top shelves? In the end, Handel went first, followed by English composers, then the Russians and then the Germans.

The other classical CDs got organized sort of by type and composer.

Obsessive compulsive issue here? For sure lol. But I can find any opera I want within a minute. The other classicals take longer to find because of my inconsistent organization of them!

Many years ago, back in the days of the LP, I was at a friend's house. He had a very large record collection, and challenged me to figure out how they were organized. I gave up after a few minutes, so he told me it was sorted alphabetically, but by the composer's FIRST name. I went home and did all of mine the same way; it was kind of interesting, but I switched back to standard last name sorting for reasons I can't remember. Now, my LPs are all in boxes and CDs are scattered everywhere, so much for any system.

nationality? Giuseppi (Verdi) or Joe (Green) lol ?

But seriously, he would have been under G. The only exceptions were Russkies.

but within each composer or group it's a hodgepodge.

Compilation CDs with music from multiple periods are on the top shelf of my revolving CD shelf, and the medieval-renaissance stuff is on the second shelf. The living composers are on the bottom shelf.

Sometimes, especially in the nineteenth century, it's hard to remember who lived when, but at least I know the approximate area to search for a given CD.

My world music CDs are organized geographically.

should they croak?

I just keep them in the order of their major periods of activity,so John Adams comes after Olivier Messiaen, just like always.

probably 50 CD's

They were alphabetical by composer. At the moment it some what of a mess. I will be getting a large rack soon so I can keep the in one place. Now there in seven smaller racks scattered around the house. It is going to be a job reorganizing them. I need to inventory them, some composers I can't even remember what all I have.

I was in the biz for years, so I got lots of promos. I separate multi-disc box sets from my singles. They just fit on the shelves better that way.

I sort everthing alpha by composer surname, then alpha by "title of work" within the composer. So concerto comes before symphony and concerto 1 comes before concerto 2, etc. Don Giovanni is sorted under "D" in Mozart. If there's a disc with multiple composers, I file it by the major work on the disc. If it's a draw - say, a CD that consists entirely of the Ravel & Debussy String Quartets - then I sort it by the first name on the spine.

When it comes to artist-driven compilations, I have an area at the end of my shelves for singers, violinists, etc and sort alpha by surname under that.

That's the only way I have a prayer of finding anything in the deluge.

BTW - I keep most of my collection in the garage. There's no room for it in the house.

It contains about 200 classical CDs, maybe about 100 cassette tapes, and an equal number of CDs and tapes in all other genres (world, rock, jazz) combined.

Floor to ceiling, and along the length of one wall between the door and the sliding glass window. Maybe 3.5 to 4 feet wide. To make sure I had enough room for all our CDs, I spaced the shelves close enough so that the space between each was just tall enough for a jewel case, plus a little space above so one could pull a disc out with a fingertip. With that tight fit, I managed to get all my CDs circa 1998 on the one unit.

Of course, soon thereafter, DVD-Audio came out, switching to a jewel case about an inch taller than a CD. And record labels started packaging boxed sets in cardboard boxes with paper sleeves instead of multi-jewel cases. It makes the boxes thinner, but also tall enough to keep from fitting on those shelves by about 1/16". :-(

It works great - if you are organized enough to put everything back in their slot..... You have one good party and you might as well start all over unles you strictly handle all the music yourself.... and even then..

So how do you organize? By Genre:? Opera, incidental, Symphony, solo works, Instrument.?

Period:? Renaisance, Baroque, Classical/

Composer:? This would seem the most logical - but the incidental guys drive me nuts. How much Gottschalk or Haslinger are you bound to have in your collection? So perhaps you setup all the major folk alphebetically and then redue the lessors in the same way unless you have collected enough to move them up to the big time......... sort of like the minors?

Any ideas?

What of composers that cross lines? Jazz/Classical. L

as a starving student in the vinyl days, I sorted by label (DGG, Philips etc) and then by Composer. The shelves looked rather nice and organized. After I went to CD's I discovered that system did not work for my collection when it passed 350 disks (I suppose that number would vary from person to person). I discovered that when I started purchasing mulitple copies by mistake.

I now sort by composer. But since so many disks are multiple composer, I sort those by "Orchestral", "Keyboard", "Strings", "Voice" and alphabetical by first listed composer within those classifications.

Second category is by performer - for example, Cecilia Bartoli and Kronos Quartet have their own sections.

Last category is for recordings that are multiple composers, then I sort them by genre, e.g. choral, chamber, arias.

What I really want to do some day is go through and make a database of every individual composition I have, with the performer/performances I have.

So many classical CDs have music by multiple composers, that probably about a third or half of my collection is stuff that I can't really categorize.

So if I'm reading a music book, for instance, and they mention Mozart's piano trio for giant balloon and dead agriculturalist or maybe a Palestrina Motet, I don't really know if I own it - it could be in the Mozart section, the performer's section (maybe Kronos Quartet recorded it?), or in the multiple-composer's section. And if it's in the multiple-composer's section, God only knows what CD it might be in - it could be one called "Afternoon Tea Music" or "Mozart/Donizeti/Poulenc/Crumb" or "Favorite Fanfares of the Idi Amin Administration" or "Obscure classical music that was used in obscure films from the 1980s".

Pain in the ass.