How Many CD's do you own?

[king ubu]

roughly 12'000 classical (I guess around 60-70% of them in boxes of various sizes), around 13'500 jazz (including several hundred LPs), and around 2'300 others (mostly rock and r & b/soul/funk) - all in one room and in no particular order 

took me 20 years on the jazz side, but a mere 4,5 on the classical (obviously I know the jazz part much, much better as I've listened intensely - and collected as much as my limited budget back then allowed - since my early teens)

[Turner]

roughly 12'000 classical (I guess around 60-70% of them in boxes of various sizes), around 13'500 jazz (including several hundred LPs), and around 2'300 others (mostly rock and r & b/soul/funk) - all in one room and in no particular order 

took me 20 years on the jazz side, but a mere 4,5 on the classical (obviously I know the jazz part much, much better as I've listened intensely - and collected as much as my limited budget back then allowed - since my early teens)

Impressive, of course. Do you also do some sort of cataloguing, including the jazz music? 

[king ubu]

Impressive, course. Do you also do some sort of cataloguing, including the jazz music?

Yes, I spend quite some time on that ... the jazz list has been started many moons ago, when still in high school (I guess I had around 500-1000 CDs back then already - I worked in school holidays to buy saxophones and CDs ... my parents gave me a tenor, but I wanted a soprano and eventually an alto as well ... and obviously for every x-mas or birthday, I would tell everyone exactly which Miles or Coltrane or Cannonball CD to give me  ).

My classical list is pretty elaborate, a first tab listing albums (units as I buy them, currently approaching the 3000 mark), then there are tabs for orchestral, concerto, chamber, piano solo, violin solo, cello solo, other solo, vocal (not listing single songs and lieder, mind me), sacred and opera. Whenever stuff arrives, I usually put it into the list right away. This helps me track down stuff when I want to listen to versions of a particular piece (i.e. I recently piled up all the Bruckner symphonies I have, taking out discs from many a box, as well as single releases - just only starting on Bruckner, but I have similar piles around with the Brahms, Mendelssohn and Schumann symphonies, though often I pick a few and decide to leave others for later, or to listen to when I start exploring the respective conductor etc - various approaches being pursued simultaneously, and sometimes dropped halfway, or paused for a few months or even a year or so).

[Jo498]

How do you store almost 30,000 discs? If there are lots of boxes they will need less space, but still... this is 5-6 times as many as I have and I have trouble with storage. If I had an ideal shelving system I'd still need more than 4 meters of wall shelves as high as I can reach (13 or 14 rows of discs) so this would (because one needs a door and a window and maybe also space for a few chairs and a stereo...) almost fill up a small room. Sure one could maybe do 2-3 more rows in high rooms and/or using a stepladder. But for 5 times as many, I'd need a decent sized hexagonal room...

[king ubu]

How do you store almost 30,000 discs? If there are lots of boxes they will need less space, but still... this is 5-6 times as many as I have and I have trouble with storage. If I had an ideal shelving system I'd still need more than 4 meters of wall shelves as high as I can reach (13 or 14 rows of discs) so this would (because one needs a door and a window and maybe also space for a few chairs and a stereo...) almost fill up a small room. Sure one could maybe do 2-3 more rows in high rooms and/or using a stepladder. But for 5 times as many, I'd need a decent sized hexagonal room...

Oh, don't ask! 

Seriously, I have bookshelves, about 7.5 metres, 2 metres high, on the top row there's just enough room for LP-sized boxes (mostly my cherished Mosaic jazz boxes), the shelves are deep enough for two rows, then on top of each rows small piles ... and on the floor, in front of most shelves, more piles (making it difficult to get stuff out of the lower shelves). I mostly know where what disc is, as I have opera shelves, vocal shelves, historical shelves, boxes shelves, Blue Note shelves, free jazz shelves, French jazz etc. shelves, but none of this very consequently (i.e. opera and vocal is spread in two areas and there are a few piles on the floor, too) - mostly its a grown order, but it very rarely takes me more than 3 minutes to find something (I guess once a month, while listening, I move around piles to look for something for 10 or 15 minutes, and usually I find the disc right where I first looked, but failed to see it at first  ).

[knight66]

I have about 18k classical CDs and about 200 misc ones. All but boxes with libretti have been removed from the jewel cases and put into thin covers. They are stored in office boxes roughly the size of shoe boxes on shelves in a large cupboard with doors. They are in composer alphbetical order. Mixed composer discs are in the order of the artist in a separate run. This fills 48 'shoe' boxes plus some CD boxes that don't fit the storage boxes such as the Solti Ring, Karajan EMI vocal discs, DG Karajan Opera discs etc.

Changing the storage method saved me many meters of shelving space. In one house, the CDs had a room to themselves with a piano and a couch. Now, they are in a room divider in the main living space.

Mike

[71 dB]

Quick calculation of CDs: 1400 classical and 800 non-classical. I have been buying CDs for 26 years meaning about 85 CDs/year in average.

[andolink]

My collection is somewhere between 4 to 5,000 CD's.  I've only ever counted them all once and that was about 11 or 12 years ago so I'm more or less extrapolating based on that.  I bought my 1st CD in 1983 some months before purchasing my first CD player, (Nono's String Quartet Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima played by the LaSalle Quartet).  Over the last 3-4 years, most of my purchases are in the form of flac files which I then burn to CD's since I don't use my computer as a source for my audio system.

[knight66]

I also started to buy CDs before I had a player. That would have also been around 1984. The first two were the Dutoit complete Ravel Daphnis and Schubert Trout.

Mike

[71 dB]

If I remember correctly when I bought my first CD player in 1990 (the cheapest JVC in a local store, 800 mk = 134 euros + inflation), I took it home and then immediately went to buy my first CD S'Express - Original Soundtrack. My second CD was Paul Simon's Graceland. At the time I was into Paul Simon, nowadays I am into Carly Simon. 

[asin]B0039L1J98[/asin][asin]B007P06DOK[/asin]

My best friend has maybe 1/10 of the amount of CDs I have and he thinks I have crazy much! It's relative. For someone who has 100 CDs 1000 CDs is a lot, but if you have 10.000 CDs, 1000 is nothing. I have started to feel myself I don't have enough time to listen to my CDs enough. I have to listen to 6 CDs every day in order to listen all of them once a year. Well, 6 CDs is about 6 hours, 25 % of a day, but I have DVD and Blu-ray too to watch! Maybe 365 CDs would be enough, one CD for every day of the year, but because we can't select an optimazed set of 365 CDs, we collect thousands of them and let 90 % of them collect dust.

[knight66]

You are right, more than 'enough' is pretty daft and I put my hands up to that. I do listen to a lot of music, esp since I was retired, but as often as not, it is from Spotify. The only mitigation is that I tend to buy either at bargain or second hand price. It is amazing what I have bought for 1 pence plus postage. But, whatever, I have more than is wise.

Mike

[Jo498]

I have about 18k classical CDs and about 200 misc ones. All but boxes with libretti have been removed from the jewel cases and put into thin covers. They are stored in office boxes roughly the size of shoe boxes on shelves in a large cupboard with doors. They are in composer alphbetical order. Mixed composer discs are in the order of the artist in a separate run. This fills 48 'shoe' boxes plus some CD boxes that don't fit the storage boxes such as the Solti Ring, Karajan EMI vocal discs, DG Karajan Opera discs etc.

Are you using the "Jazzloft sleeves" or sth. similar? This saves probably around 50% or more of the space compared with jewel cases but one need the "shoeboxes" and shelves for them, so one really has to change the shelving system if one had "optimized" it for jewel cases before.

I started buying CDs in late autumn 1988 but for the first 10 years or more my collection remained in the fairly manageable 3 digits. It started growing faster once I became active on Ebay in 2001, got a better paid job in 2003 and a larger flat in 2006. In some years ca. 2005-10 I must have bought 100s of discs per year. I slowed down in the last years but with used discs becoming ever cheaper I am still not poor enough to stop buying although my circumstances are not even close as comfortable as in 2006-10.

[knight66]

Jo they are not as sophisticated as the Jazzloft ones. They don't open out, so are even thinner. They are all on about 17 feet of shelving. Formerly I had about 40 feet of shelving. I am almost maxed out on the space. So that might slow me down. (Might)

I hope next year enables you to buy what you want and not be concerned, all the best for 2017.

Mike

[andolink]

My hunch is that the really huge collections result from buying lots of boxed sets.  I've only bought one boxed set in my life and that was the complete Hilding Rosenberg string quartets on Caprice (which is only 7 discs).

[Mirror Image]

There's no other way for me to answer this except for this: I have a lot and I do mean A LOT. That's about all I can say.

[SonicMan46]

There's no other way for me to answer this except for this: I have a lot and I do mean A LOT. That's about all I can say.

John - LOL!    But, has the number of CDs in your collection caught up w/ your post count (or exceeded it)?    Dave

ADDENDUM:  For myself, I bought my first CD player in December 1984 when the local price dipped below $500 - I switched to Apple products in 2013 - kept my classical and non-classical CDs on Access databases, and my last printout was April 2014 (then donated my PCs to the medical center) - at the time, I had just over 4000 classical CDs & about 1600 non-classical ones (have not added much at all to the latter category); however, I suspect that my classical number has increased by 400+, just cannot update the database and don't want to really count up the additions scribbled on a 40+ page printout - SO, probably have close to 6000 discs. 

[Mirror Image]

John - LOL!    But, has the number of CDs in your collection caught up w/ your post count (or exceeded it)?    Dave

I'm sure my number of CDs do not exceed my post count. That would be a ton of CDs.

[Jay F]

I had between 2,000-3,000 of CDs (mostly classical, but also pop/rock) during the '80s and '90s, then pared down to just below 1,000 before a big move in 1999. I had around 500 LPs (mostly rock, but quite a bit of jazz, which was new to me in the '90s; almost none were classical, which I found hard to listen to on LP).

I've culled again, having put all my music on three hard drives, and now have 400 CDs and 100 LPs. I listen exclusively to sound files, either over computer speakers or a wireless bedroom speaker. Listening close works better for me because I have tinnitus, and this new way of listening works much better than listening to CDs ever did. I enjoy the SQ much more than I did when I had more revealing speakers. I have 20,696 "songs" on iTunes, which, divided by 12 (my norm for album tracks since 1963) equals 1724 albums, more than enough to sustain me throughout the rest of my life. I hope.

[DaveF]

I have 20,696 "songs" on iTunes

I discovered to my delight that when I changed my iTunes language to French, they became "morceaux".  Perhaps it also works like that for other language settings.

And I'm lagging behind you with 18,286.

which, divided by 12 (my norm for album tracks since 1963) equals 1724 albums

If you switch to "Album View" in iTunes, it shows you an exact count at bottom of screen - 1142 for me.

[PerfectWagnerite]

I'm sure my number of CDs do not exceed my post count. That would be a ton of CDs.

I don't know anyone who can do 36k+ posts in that amount of time...