Like I said yesterday, I have issues when it comes to organizing my music. I have vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs. Each format of music that I own is organized in its own way. My records are in old milk crates or recycling bins. These containers are great for storing records and make it easy to access them. My cassettes are in a wall mounted display rack.

My CDs are the real problem though. They are stored in a variety of racks and storage units. I have them organized in alphabetical order by genre. The problem is that they take up so much room. Compact Disc is really an oxymoron. They are not very compact. If my entire music collection were cassette tapes, it would take up about a tenth of the space it does now.

So what do I do?

I came to the answer this summer. I looked at my records and realized that if CDs could be stored in a thin way like records, they would take up a lot less room. CD wallets wouldn’t work because I would have to buy way too many of them for my purposes. I then came across these handy DJ crates and knew right away that my music space issues had been solved.

Here is what my collection looks like now.

These crates are made to hold 510 CDs. I took the inserts out of the jewel cases and slid them in the front of the sleeves. I then broke apart the jewel case so I could get the back tray art. I cut the spines and then slid right into the sleeves. I cut the back song list to fit the sleeves as well. Now my CDs look like how records are packaged. You can take out one of the sleeves and see the front and back cover art. You can take the CD out, play it, and look at the art as you do so. It’s absolutely perfect. Of course, this way though I only fit 255 CDs in a crate. So I needed four cases to house my collection.

It took me a long time to take apart all of my CDs. I still have then organized alphabetically and by genre. I have a section for rap, a section of tapes converted to CD, a section for rock, a section of singles, and a section of all other genres. It is beautiful.

The final touch was to make a list of all my CDs in a chart on MS Word. I numbered each CD so that I can easily find them now. I also have a nice record of my collection, all 810 CDs. Each new CD I get can get added into my alphabetical list so that I will be able to find it easily. They crates won’t be all alphabetical now but at least my collection is now small and portable, efficient, and beautiful.