Continuing with CDs?

Yeah I thought I was the smartest girl ever when I thought of using the Billy for CDs. Turns out heaps of people got there before me, of course!

I also use an Ikea Kallax for LPs but that's a well known hack. I read somewhere they were actually designed to fit records? But yeah, guess I'm an Ikea fan when it comes to physical media.

Just to capture the name, since this might be the third time I've forgotten, I love the Ikea Robin cd shelves, particularly the royal blue color. Discontinued, but fits 15+ in jewel cases for each of the 14 sections (7 x 2) in a unit.

G McBB, thanks for the sleeve tip!
I am planning a move soon, so I think those will really help out...
Do you use their inner sleeve things for double cds?

Morning Dove White by One Dove was pressed on vinyl when it was new but has never been repressed. Ditto the early albums by Lush and a tonne of Britpop acts.

ok i am intrigued - how are those space-saving sleeves at protecting the CD's playing surface?

Reddit Billy dude is an absolute amateur: the spacers in normal, sane people’s Billys are hundreds of lesser CDs that you don’t need spine-out, but want to keep around in case of reference.

Yeah I'm sorting through a lot of stuff I've kept in Caselogics for a while and making a distinction between those where the booklets actually have liner notes of relevance/interest and those that don't -- for the former I'm thinking I may get those sleeves, though like Josefa, sadly no back covers were kept. Ah well!

Just gotta decide if my CD shelf needs to go entirely (sell 'em all) or needs to grow large enough to be a striking design feature in the room it resides in.

I've been having the vague desire to buy a small/portable CD player, as I don't seem to have managed to have kept any. But it's really pointless

I use Billy too. Each shelf is about 1.5x full - full row pushed to the back and half the shelf full in front of that, so that I have to shove that front row of CDs back and forth to see what's behind. Not completely ideal but it's the best solution given the space I have.

My parents still have a wood or particle board CD shelf they bought for the family in the '90s. It's designed to hold 512 CD's but they use it for random junk now, stuff that's actually got plenty of weight to it, and surprisingly the shelves still look perfectly straight. I wish I knew the manufacturer because at one point in the '10s, I bought shelves that cosmetically looked like the same model, albeit in black (theirs is "natural wood" color), and the shelves would be visibly bowed after six months, meaning you had to flip them. I've since disposed of them, but it's clear whoever made that one in the '90s really knew what they were doing.

Slowsquatch asked: "Do you use their inner sleeve things for double cds?"

Double CDs are easy to handle - one disc is paired with the front cover on the left side, another with the back insert on the right. I didn't feel the need to use any inner sleeves.

Emsworth asked: "how are those space-saving sleeves at protecting the CD's playing surface?"

They work fine as far as I can tell. I'm not particularly rough with CDs, nor do I take them out of the house. They sit on my racks and occasionally get pulled out for liner note review.

Because you can cram even more on a rack, when you pull one out there won't be a convenient hole in the row like there was with jewel cases, though!

ok i am intrigued - how are those space-saving sleeves at protecting the CD's playing surface?

Most of my CDs don't have their playing side touching the plastic, but they've somehow actually got a plastic material that doesn't seem to degrade and doesn't stick to itself or other things like CDs.
They last well and are protective.
Main issue I have is that the last batch or two I've had don't always fit the tray/spine paper well, so that when you fold them (taking care to only bend the paper at the seam of the outer spine), the inner plastic gets slightly folded over itself. It's fine but not perfectly neat, ya know?

thanks Raven and Gerald, I guess I will order a batch and see how I go

It’s worth noting that the vulnerable part of a CD is the label side - that’s the stamped audio with a thin metal coating and then lacquer on top. The play side is thick polycarbonate and can be buffed out quite deeply. But once a seller taped a rare CD I bought into the tray for “safe postage” and the tape lifted off the label, the lacquer and the metal, so the disc was totally unplayable.

Very true. The worst came from Nimbus's pressing plants. For a long time their lacquer formulation was pretty terrible - it got sticky and attracted dust and debris, but it was also risky to stick in certain CD sleeves, especially ones that had no cloth liner. (I want to say PVC sleeves could be especially destructive.) If you tried cleaning the under running water, the lacquer actually immediately absorb the water and would break apart and rinse off. Sometimes there was another layer of lacquer that would remain intact so the metal substrate would stay the same, but I've had one disc where the metal actually began to dissolve around the hub. Nimbus eventually changed their lacquer formulation, but you can always spot the old one - when it's humid, just touch the hub area where there's no data encoded, and you see how sticky it is.

Also be careful with plastic sleeves and CD-R's. Some plastic material like PVC can potentially stick to CD-R labels, usually the early "printable" formulations on some brands like Kodak and Mitsui, and it'll actually peel off the label WITH the reflective layer underneath, rendering a large part of the disc unreadable.

*cleaning them

Guess I can't really continue with CDs--finally got all the ones that had been in storage at my folks place the last 20 years, and it's filled up my shelves almost completely...

https://www.twitter.com/musicophiliamix/status/1615902036784222213

It's a beautiful sight to me, I have to admit. As close as one can get to seeing the good parts of my whole life laid out in one place. Funny how I can still remember when and where I bought so many of them.

Same. I look at all my CDs stacked up and see nothing but stories and memories. I look at my books (a huge percentage mainly unread) and see nothing but guilt and shame.

Crazy to look at 30 years, all in one spot:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fm2txKeXEAAx5st?format=jpg&name=large

My wife and I live in a wide-open loft apartment, so it's super cool of her to be open to letting my CDs dominate an entire wall.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/81591a0f-f116-4280-8e3b-2de79aea9d30/gif

Bah. I suck at this.

damn fine looking wall of discs there, love to see it

I had a similar set-up for awhile, possibly the same exact number of shelves too, but due to various reasons, I had to toss the shelves (all damaged anyway) and replace them with revolving towers. I miss the wall of music though, I was hoping to one day put in better shelves (like after settling down and buying a home) and having an audio-visual equivalent to those impressive home libraries I'd see in some of the fancy brownstones I'd pass by at night (always prominently displayed in the large, well-lit ground floor windows).

A most excellent CD, rug and cat combo.

Sorry you lost your shelves. I actually never had my CDs on shelves, between leaving my childhood home at 18 and last year at 41--moved too often, and never had a spare wall for them. And it took me a long time to find sturdy, deconstructable/movable shelves. I even designed my own and tried to commission a cabinet maker to build them (he flaked out). So for all those years they basically got ripped and immediately boxed up.

Sort of sad that by the time I actually had space, stability, and found shelves--I'd basically gone to 97% digital purchases on Bandcamp. Probably bought fewer than two dozen CDs each the last three years--not long before, would've been hundreds a year. But then again, there's room for literally about 30 more CDs on the shelves--so maybe it was time.

If I continue with CDs any further, I'll probably have to start instituting a one-in-one-out policy.

(Getting perilously close to filling up the blu-ray shelves, too--which I've had a huge resurgence of buying in the last two years, replacing dozens of old DVDs and buying probably 200+ more, after getting a UST 4K projector because the apartment had a 17' high blank white wall and I just had to...)

I've had a huge resurgence of buying in the last two years, replacing dozens of old DVDs

Been doing the same. But they all go in binders and I file the booklets (which given what I normally buy means I have a lot of good ones) in a bookcase.

Yeah, I'm in a similar boat with DVD's though now UHD's are complicating things! I was upgrading too many things that to make things cost effective, I had to start weeding out titles - like, do I really want to keep this and continue upgrading or just drop it from the library? It gets annoying with the large box sets where you have to buy films you weren't planning to but otherwise must in order to acquire the rest.

wow that is some wall

great looking cat too

going to be visiting NYC from UK in april - where's the best spots for CD shopping?

Academy on W. 18th

Yeah definitely Academy, ESPECIALLY if you're looking for classical, that selection of CD's is pretty enormous. Outside of classical music, they still have a good selection of CD's, but it's kind of sad that's as good as it gets in NYC now - Amoeba in Los Angeles probably has 100 times the selection, and virtually any Newbury Comics in any suburb of Massachusetts will be even greater too.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, NYC is definitely not a destination stop for CD shopping. Definitely is for vinyl though.

book-off midtown https://www.bookoffusa.com/bookoff-49-w-45th-ny-store/

they've got lots of CDs, probably not the super rare stuff but also better than your average thrift store

https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/Js4Y6NavKn9vdx3MVLY2nw/o.jpg

If all these rumors I'm seeing about vinyl prices about to skyrocket in the next year or so, I wonder if the CD renaissance will be sooner than people expected.

lol I hope so, then I can sell them

Saw this story from earlier this month about Canadian labels, can't imagine this wouldn't also impact US prices:

Independent music stores shared the heartless news Wednesday that major record labels like Universal Music Canada and Warner Music Canada are increasing their prices for vinyl albums two days after Valentine’s Day.

“So, Universal, Warner (and likely Sony soon) are all raising their prices considerably over the next month,” Ottawa music store Vertigo Records shared on Instagram Wednesday afternoon.

“We always keep out prices low, but will have to adjust,” the store added. “The major labels need to get every last drop of blood from that stone. Sorry!”

I live in the Boston area, and the CD stock at the Newbury Comics stores has seriously shriveled over the last few years, to make way for more vinyl and tchotchkes. Like, the entire CD section now is typically about 8' wide, including all genres.

Yeah, seems like it's happening to so many chains. The few Barnes and Nobles that still even have a music section are increasingly turning space over to vinyl. A new B&N recently opened near me and I was happy to see they still even had a CD section at all, even if it was only a 4'-0" wide stretch of shelf space. Bafflingly, however, they stocked it by jamming every inch with only the spines facing out. Hello neck pain for browsing.

Some stores still have incredible CD sections. I really loved Music Millennium in Portland when I was out there, they managed to have ample space for huge floor space for both formats.

Music Millenium is one of the last places I've found in the last 5 years to still have a good CD selection. Not long before, the Rough Trade in Brooklyn still had lots of good CDs, but I'm guessing they've gone all vinyl since moving into their smaller Manhattan space. I'm hoping Dusty Groove in Chicago hasn't gone all-vinyl... Ah, for the days when Other Music's mostly-CDs shelves weren't even the best in New York. Would be a miracle to see well-curared CD shelves, today. Guess I need to take a trip to Japan...

The Barnes & Noble near me moved from a large space to a smaller space a few hundred feet away recently. Before the move, cashiers told me that the movie/music section would not be in the new location, and that’s technically true, as the original section was a good chunk of the store (albeit one that shoppers rarely visited).

In the new space, there’s a sort of CD/vinyl shelf or wall stocked with a bare minimum of music that they know will sell, primarily Taylor Swift. But there’s also a floor to ceiling shelf that’s entirely k-pop CDs.

Haven't been to the Dusty Groove store in a few years but they still show a good number of new/used CDs on their weekly mailout. Another place in Midwest that's still great for CDs is Dearborn Music near Detroit.

Yes, Dearborn Music is absolutely amazing for CDs. My hometown! And where I first bought music (45 rpm singles) many years ago.

Silver Platters (3 locations in WA) is great for both new and used CDs, and used CDs are usually in good or great condition

going to be visiting NYC from UK in april - where's the best spots for CD shopping?

― maelin, Friday, January 20, 2023 8:25 AM (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

yesterday I went to the Jazz Record Center for the first time in a few years. It's on the 8th floor of a building on W. 26th St, so it feels off the beaten path and like a bit of a time warp. mostly older folks in there. anyway i didn't look through it much but they have a decent sized CD section, mostly jazz as implied by the name. although they have new and used CDs together, which bugs me.

I think I bought a Mingus CD box set there in the mid 00s. It was really a weird setup iirc, like it's in a random old office building. Does the elevator just dump you off inside or am I making that up?

No, there's a hallway and a door into the shop. there must be other things in on the same floor.

Bought my first CD in a long time recently, tricky’s nearly god album (not on streaming) and it was only $2. A steal.

Silver Platters was where I bought my first CDs when I was a Seattleite. Happy to hear they're still extant.