Organizing Classical music CD's
Yes, there's a lot going on in the world right now. But that's no reason to have a disorganized or badly organized music collection.
In the past 20 or so years I have been struggling more and more to come up with a "system" to organize my music recordings. I am interested in what others have done in this regard.
When I was in college I started a system of organization that served me for a number of years. The system was that things were organized around the publisher which gives the collection a very handsome, somewhat encyclopedic appearance. But I discovered that there was a limit to the number of records and that was around 350 for me. Obviously this number would vary based on what you can remember as far as data points go, composer, orchestra, conductor, soloist, KV or other classification, that sort of thing.
As I had accumulated 640 CD's and spent a lot of time looking for something in particular, it needed fixing.
And classical CD's (like their vinyl predecessors) often came with a number of musical pieces with variety of composers, artists etc.
In the end I settled on a modulus of "discriminatory composers". CD's of the same composer obviously are organized to that composer. CD's with 2 composers go the the favored composer. For example: I have very fond of Max Bruch and as such I have accumulated 20 recordings of the 1st Violin Concerto with various artists. But there are "secondary composers" on the cd's. So I have Bruch - Mendelsohn, Bruch - Beethoven, Bruch - Brahms, etc. I can change the location based on this discriminatory process.
For example, a CD with the Tchaikovsky - Glazunov violin concertos can go under "T" or "G" depending on its other attributes that I decide. There are plenty of recordings of the Tchaikovsky concerto but Glazunov is more rare.
Once we are organized by composer we go to subdivisions of orchestral works, keyboard, winds, strings.
CD's that have more than 3 composers the CD's get put into a group "Variety" using the same subdivision. So if I want to listen to the Holberg Suite, which is part of a collection, I only have about 10 CD's to look through.
In my research I found that there are commercial systems where you just type in the CD number and the system lists everything in an order with all the other data points so you can look up your CD and then find it.
Going through the collection revealed that I had a number of interesting recordings that I had forgotten about. But most of all I can now find things quickly.
I'd love to learn about other systems that people use.
Thanks for reading.
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