I'm on my way to my "vision" of how to store CDs. I'm pretty excited about it, actually.

I don't use CDs, for obvious reasons, but I have a ton of them and want to keep them organized. I listen to a lot of classical and early music and "Alphabetical" is misleading, to say the least. Alphabetical by what? Artist, Composer, Soloist? What about CDs with multiple composers? It's truly awful.

It seems to me that the best way to organize CDs (if you have a lot of them) is the way that parts are organized in well run manufacturing environments. That is, with a part number. Metadata about the CD can be stored in a database at the individual track level. Since this is a lot like mp3 tags, the CD tracking database and mp3 metadata database can be the same thing. For each track, we have in the database:

- Track information (number, title, duration, year, bitrate, mp3 filename, etc, etc)
- Source information (CD name, year, etc, and a physical catalog number)
- Artist(s) appearing on the track
- other information, for instance a "lent to" to track CDs that I lend.

OK, so now I can find an mp3 using nice sql querying rather than a dumb heirarchical file structure (the same issues with organizing CDs also apply to organizing mp3s).

The CDs themselves are each tagged with their catalog number and arranged in that order, which is a sequential number assigned by the database. Initially, this can be random, but as you add more CDs you will find that the newest CDs have the highest catalog numbers.

If I search for a track or a source, I know instantly what the CD catalog number is and since the CDs are in that order it is very simple to find it.

The best part (that I'm picking up this weekend) is how I'm storing the CDs. I'm really excited about this.

I love to read, so I have lots of bookshelves stuffed with books in my home. I had an idea that I could design a CD cabinet that looked like a turn of the century Mission style library card catalog. The drawers are sized to perfectly hold a CD jewel case, and they can also easily hold CDs or DVDs in archive envelopes.

There are 3 rows of 5 drawers and a cabinet with doors below. The cabinet section below the CD storage drawers has two hidden shelves for sheet music or for boxed sets. There is a hidden drawer inside of each door to hold things like guitar strings, picks, metronomes, tuning forks, etc, etc.

I don't have the space for a wood working shop, so I commissioned the piece from a local artist who specializes in Mission style cabinet making. I showed him my design and we worked out the details together. I saw it completed for the first time a week ago and it is beautiful. Entirely quarter-sawn oak with a wax finish. The CD drawers are all dovetailed and slide on waxed ways. Each door front has a card catalog pull on it made from antiqued brass, each with a little space for a label.

The next steps to a perfect CD/mp3 situation are:

1. Silent player for the stereo that gets the mp3s from a noisy server in another room.
2. Build and populate the SQL database.
3. Integrate the SQL database into the great linux console mp3 player "mp3blaster". I want to be able to build playlists on the fly using an "advanced search" functionality that references the database. This is the hard part, but mp3blaster is community developed and others are interested in this approach.

If anyone cares, I can post some pictures of the cabinet after I get it moved to my place.

Jim