Organizing Your Music Collection

[Camelogue]

All alphabetical, and unless I have a notion to listen to something specific, I listen to them by going through alphabetically and listening to what I feel like listening to. Probably 10 % of my collection never gets listened to.

[chalkpie]

Fusion stuff can go either prog or jazz....

[alucard]

Fusion stuff can go either prog or jazz....

I have put Wigwam, Tasavallan Presidentti and Pekka Pohjola under JR/ Fusion which resumes at the same time my Finnish Prog section, but I have left all Canterbury together JR/ Fusion or else....

[D.Eric]

3 categories: 1. Classical 2. Popular (95% the wife's) 3. Unpopular (100% mine)
then within each, ordered by Composer/Artist then chronogolically within Composer/Artist

[alucard]

I have a problem with CDs that come in small cardboard sleeves mostly samplers. They tend to "dissapear" when filed between regular CDs . So I put all in two large boxes, but sometimes I look for a CD and I have to go through the whole boxes to find them. So yesterday I went through the boxes and found some nice stuff that I integrated back into the regular shelves:
MBV : last one, I had forgotten I got it on CD, I have the vinyl and while looking at the cover I saw that there was a small slot to hold a CD.
Pearlfishers : Colour Book, bought it on vinyl and wanted to put it on my Mp3 player and bought a download, but I found a CD that came along with the record.
The Go Betweens : Acoustic Demos, this was a giveaway with a magazine and is really cool.
A couple of Wire Tappers CDs that I never listened to, got their own mini section now.

[Rarebird]

I have a problem with CDs that come in small cardboard sleeves mostly samplers. They tend to "dissapear" when filed between regular CDs . So I put all in two large boxes, but sometimes I look for a CD and I have to go through the whole boxes to find them. So yesterday I went through the boxes and found some nice stuff that I integrated back into the regular shelves:
MBV : last one, I had forgotten I got it on CD, I have the vinyl and while looking at the cover I saw that there was a small slot to hold a CD.
Pearlfishers : Colour Book, bought it on vinyl and wanted to put it on my Mp3 player and bought a download, but I found a CD that came along with the record.
The Go Betweens : Acoustic Demos, this was a giveaway with a magazine and is really cool.
A couple of Wire Tappers CDs that I never listened to, got their own mini section now.

I have some of those. If they are by one artist I mostly keep them in the box the cardboard sleeves came in. Otherwise, with some Krautrock boxes, I just put them between the other CD's.

[moecurlythanu]

Arranged by 1) Genre 2) Country 3) Alphabet

This is interesting, and I guess goes some way to answer soundsweird's question. But how specific do you get with the Genres? And to get to what Rarebird was asking, do you put 80s King Crimson with the American or English stuff, and how about Marillion? You have English, Irish, Welsh. Or Great Britain is one "country" for this purpose? Just curious - I'd like to give this method a try.

Forgot to answer this, sorry Jed. I'm not entirely consistent with my genres. I'll break Rock subgenres down to classic Rock (think unadorned, straight Rock,) Progressive Rock (no breaking it down further than that,) Psych, Punk, Goth, New Wave, New Romantic/Minimal Synth, Jam/Roots, possibly more, I'd have to be looking at it. Other Meta Genres I don't break down into subgenres, such as Folk (which I don't break down into Trad, Singer-Songwriter, Psych-Folk, etc,) Country, Jazz/Jazz-Rock which also don't get divided further. Within each grouping, I divide by country alphabetically, then artist alphabetically, with releases grouped chronologically. Exception being that V.A. albums of each genre will go at the end of each country's artists, after z.

I don't break the UK down further than that, but again an idiosyncrasy - I group artists from Northern Ireland together with Ireland (RoI.) As for ex-pats, such as Nektar, I put them with the country of origin, not the country they live in at the time of release.

As for multi-national groups, if the group has a history, they go where their history is. KC would go in UK. The only time I ever separated an artist's albums was Porcupine Tree. For a while, I had their early albums in the Psych section and later in the Prog-Rock section. I wasn't comfortable with that and put them all in the Prog-Rock section.

It's not entirely consistent, but it makes sense to me, and locating records/CDs is easy. The overflow piles on the floor, on the other hand, are another matter.

[Rarebird]

My dad has all his traditional jazz organised on label.

He is wondering why I wouldn't organise my collection the same way.

[Fracktured]

I have 2 peach crates where I put my southern rock cds. 1 pear crate with jazz cds. After that for the most part it’s just sectioned off into 3 categories. 1. Classical 2. Progressive rock and fusion. 3. Straight out rock music like zeppelin sabbath etc.


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[Azol]

Electronic and Prog Rock separately, by major Artists (not alphabetically, but by 'families' or styles instead) then by Year. The assortments of other genres inbetween
Huge selection of Classical - on its own dedicated shelves; I hand-made those myself with tempered glass front panels. Shelf heights fitting CDs and DVDs. Again, not alphabetically but by period and genre (I keep operas separately as well as modern music).

P.S. At first I said I had it alphabetically but of course I'm not that pedantic (sorry guys). The reason is when I hear about music collections the first thing that comes to my mind is organizing via catalogue then physically on the shelves. The main resource of information is my catalogue (CATraxx software) and the shelves provide me with an inspiration and an impulse to pick up something particular