How do you organize your physical music collection?
 

A spinoff from a discussion on Urban's "100 things that piss me off..." thread.


I used to file everything alphabetically, but it was annoying to have Beatles albums, which I never listen to, cluttering up the top shelf, not to mention the embarrasing albums like the Joan Armatrading album a friend bought for me. So now I organize everything based on:
1. How much I like it
2. How often I listen to it

#2 is more important. I'm extremely lazy and don't feel like wading through the bottom shelf everytime I want to listen to XTC or X-Ray Spex, which is pretty often, so I just put those albums up on the top shelf. Problem solved.

It's also more interesting because I'm the only one who can find anything, unless someone else knows my tastes pretty well and can guess that Who's Next will be somewhere near the top while Live At Leeds will be somewhere closer to the floor.

i do pretty much the same thing
s',uch easier but it does mean you have to consciously challenge yourself to listen to newer stuff

Yeah i do the same thing, i don't have an enormous amount of CD's which helps. I have to have them all stacked though due to rapid loss of space, which is a bit crap.
While it is random they are ordered by artist though. It's an odd order but i'm quite particular about it, there's no reason for The Stooges being above Tom Waits but like hell i'm going to change it.

I have an enormous collection on my computer, and I once spent like an entire month organizing it alphabetically by artist.

...or you could just get itunes which does it anyway you want

My collection is alphabetical and within that each artist is arranged chronologically. Recently I decided to split out all my comps and soundtracks and arrange them alphabetically because I kept running into the problem of forgetting the names of them and having it take forever to go through my whole collection find them.

Heh. Yes, overall I'm pretty anal about how they're organized and my wife thinks it's hilarious.

i organize it alphabetically, then i organize each artist's releases chronologically.

In my ipod it's alphabetical by band/artist. If I have only one song from a particular band/artist it goes in the "Various" bin which is broken up into 3 sections "A-H", "I-P", "Q-Z" and is alphabetical by song. If I have 2 songs or more by a particular artist, they get their own play list.

I am currently in the process of digitising all my music (4000+ albums). The stuff that is on my comp/iPod etc are obviously sorted any way I choose, the beauty of a digital collection.

The rest, whilst it waits to be sorted lay in various boxes. Nobody will be believe me but I know which box any album is in when asked, lol.

if converting to MP3... make sure it's at a 320kbs rate. I wish somebody would have told me that 5 years ago :(