Continuing with CDs?

While we're add it, I wish Amazon wouldn't have abandoned the pretense of even trying to protect jewel cases when they are shipped. The last two CDs I got from them had absolutely shattered jewel cases. Not cracked or with the middle hub broken, mind you, absolutely shattered.

use that trick where you pop the bottom hinge off the cover and lift it up, lets you use the two halves of the jewel case to remove the factory seal in one go

― avellano medio inglés (f. hazel), Monday, 6 July 2020 21:53 (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'd never thought of that. Must remember next time.

"use that trick where you pop the bottom hinge off the cover and lift it up, lets you use the two halves of the jewel case to remove the factory seal in one go"

Learned that one watching the staff at Blockbuster Music open CDs so you could listen to them in the store.

Lighter fluid can work wonders on sticky residue left on jewel cases as well.

xp just gotta be careful not to break off the tab on the case that "locks" it in place

Learned that one watching the staff at Blockbuster Music open CDs so you could listen to them in the store.

lol same! sound warehouse though.

Goo Gone is a great product, if you don't have paint thinner. Unless it's a digipak. One recent used Amazon buy brought one with a big barcode sticker. Argh.

lighter fluid otm, also great for LP jackets

lighter fluid is also a viable option if you break the little plastic "teeth" that secure a CD to the tray of a Digipak

i.e. you may as well just immolate yourself

I had a brilliant idea many years ago to make replacement teeth circles. You would break out the remaining teeth and glue my product there in its place. Now that CDs are dying I guess there's no need to be proprietary about it.

I'd still buy those in 2020! but it seems like it would be tough to break them off cleanly without damaging the tray. maybe you could bring a stack of busted digipacks to a record store and pay $1 apiece to have them "professionally restored"

use that trick where you pop the bottom hinge off the cover and lift it up, lets you use the two halves of the jewel case to remove the factory seal in one go

This is what I've used. And any residue leftover should be easily removed by pressing the same sticker down on the residue and yanking it off fast - just repeat until all the residue sticks back on to the sticker as it's yanked off the case.

yeah the hinge pop off or scrapping the stickered edge along a counter is what we did in the record store. and then goo gone and razor blades for extra annoying stickers.

I forget who taught me the pop-off-the-cover trick but boy did that blow my mind when I finally learned it, years too late

i feel like the green rykodisk cd cases couldn't be popped off.

or else they just broke very easily if you tried.

I still have all my CD's, but no easy way to play them, so I haven't in 6 or 7 years!

Yeah the green Ryko cases were really brittle. Once I wrote them and complained and they sent me like six replacement cases though!

mostly what i remember about the green rykos is that they had worse teeth than late-period mark e. smith

Those green cases were (a) gross, (b) made the artwork look off key and (c) were kind of elitist.

I hated those green case, and yes, it kind of f-ed up the artwork. I wondered if any of the high profile artists they once had on their roster (Elvis Costello, David Bowie, Sugar, etc.) ever complained?

I still have all my CD's, but no easy way to play them, so I haven't in 6 or 7 years!

My player as such would I guess be my Blu-ray player, though I have a separate Blu-ray drive for ripping. Which I still do.

I rip my CDs on my home PC, play them in my 5CD changer, and keep them stored in massive alphabetized wallets. which I reorganize by necessity roughly once a year.

i couldn't even give away all my case logic 336s when i got rid of all my cds years ago. A friend is trying to move during the pandemic and is asking me when i got rid of my music /dvds and if it was painful. I am just like ffs. They haven't even touched those boxes since they last moved.

I’ve been using a DVD player for years, I want to get an actual CD player tho so I can program tracks

I want a decent used CD player, surprisingly hard to find

I can't vouch for quality, but at least getting a hold of a DVD drive (and all of them should play CD's) is pretty easy and ridiculously affordable. If you just need something to play a CD and plug into your stereo, I'd do that.

Here's one at Wal-Mart going for SEVEN dollars:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/onn-upscaling-HDMI-DVD-Player-with-remote/641944715

The one thing 'flattened' digital can't replicate is the scanning of a collection to see what you might fancy putting on. As such, I can't countenance putting my CDs in wallets because this essentially replicates that flattening process.

Agreed ^^. I dislike those wallets. I suppose I have the privilege of a reasonable amount of space.

I use an old Denon "universal" player (DVD-2930) which was cheap used and does a good job with CDs - and plays HDCDs, SACDs and DVD-A as well, should that be yr bag

Had a Discman hooked up in my home system til I randomly found a cheap Tivoli wooden player locally (the sound is not any better)

There's no way in hell I was ever going to have storage/display room for 2000+ CDs in their cases is the long and short of it. I might have to start taking a Sharpie to the ones with really anonymous-looking CD designs, though.

And of course the vast, vast majority of those have no resale value whatsoever

Last time I moved (3 years ago), I decided to dump most of my CD packaging in the recycling skips at the back of my building. It was a bit spooky* to see 25+ years of stuff just tossed in the trash like that. (* - Don't worry, I have Spooky on vinyl). I filled a couple of binders with the discs but, as Simon H says, I flip through them now and have no idea what some of them are. I had to Shazam one the other day.

I still have a couple of racks of stuff I kept intact. Most of the comps, cos they're impossible to navigate without liner notes.

yeah, I kept some of the box sets and things with cooler packaging intact

I've been doing the discman plugged into my stereo thing for a while and have been wanting to upgrade to a nicer player, but have been having a surprisingly annoying finding players that (1) have a digital display and the traditional stop/track advance/play/pause CD player buttons on the front, (2) are less than 100 bucks, and (3) dont look like complete shit with some kind of weird bulging black plastic 2002-ass boombox design. Frustrating that there are so many cheap DVD players like that $7 one at walmart that would work perfectly fine, but they all either have no display or just one single button on the front or something. Its a tough life.

I went the Craigslist route and ended up with a very durable player.

"There's no way in hell I was ever going to have storage/display room for 2000+ CDs in their cases is the long and short of it."

Yeah I can sympathise. I'm lucky that I do have the space for that. I enjoy browsing.

you threw away the packaging and not just the case? yikes.

that said, all the binders i've looked at had big enough pockets for the square booklets but not quite enough room for the longer back bits (where the tracklisting normally is) or jcards from cd singles.

(thinks of all the things i bought because the cover was interesting...)

Cover Flow was the best digital method of browsing album covers I've seen so far, so of course Apple ditched it.

Yep, I think I started down the the route of prising open the jewel cases and retaining the rear card (ignoring the problem of where to fit them) but after about 50, I thought "sod this". I kept some booklets but if it was *that* nice, I kept the whole thing. Same with DVDs/Blu-Rays; I think I kept all the BFI stuff, intact or booklets.

xp

I think at one point i had just the discs and booklets upright in shoeboxes so I could just flip through them like vinyl.

I kept a few booklets but tbh most booklets are shite and I didn't feel bad about ditching them

About ten years back (crazy to think of it!) is when I did my mass reduction, either donating a slew of CDs or putting them into CaseLogics, along with their booklets. What I kept as-is were pretty much any/all compilations (due to the liner note question, though a few went straight to the CaseLogics like the Have A Nice Day discs I had around, things that weren't 'standard' CD packaging and anything that was straight up CDR, as I had a lot from the psych/drone underground that fit that category in particular. That's about where it's stayed since though I've adjusted as I went; I have one big CD rack still, purchased when I got to SF, but since I had about ten or so before the reduction it's still a reduction. There's a little spillover but that's mostly small boxsets that can literally stand on their own, things like the Prince reissues, the Fall Peel Sessions set, etc. I do a little fine tuning here and there as I go. (As for DVD/Blurays that's all straight to the CaseLogics with just a couple of exceptions.)

Time for a new link to https://spacesavingsleeves.com/ - I junked my jewel boxes for them many years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40hd2-IXpdI

I do keep my Criterions in their packaging since they actually do hold a bit of value.

that said, all the binders i've looked at had big enough pockets for the square booklets but not quite enough room for the longer back bits (where the tracklisting normally is)

Yup. Has anyone found binders with pockets that will accommodate the back bits?

I have a couple of vintage curio cabinets that I got from my grandmother's house years ago, that I use to store special-packaging CDs (box sets, CDs in metal tins, odd sizes, wood boxes, CDs that come in books, etc.) Even box sets can be unwieldy (i.e. the Alice Cooper Old School box shaped liked a classroom desk) but you kind of have to keep them intact.

I would think with the back bits you could just fold the spines underneath and slip in the same envelope as the booklets. Or cut the spines off entirely.