I have a bunch of CDs, no accurate count, but I’m guessing ~700ish, and will continue to climb. I’ve still not unpacked them since our move & need some shelving.
At our old place they were organized on 3 random old bookshelves. 2 of them were crap particle board & weren’t worth attempting to move, the 3rd has been put back to use for books. There was too much wasted space on them, so I’d prefer a CD-specific solution. However, perusing Amazon for their larger shelving units shows many people complaining that they don’t hold up to the weight of being fully loaded, whether steel or wood. I’m not finding much on google either.
Building my own is out, as I’d like something sturdy & better than I can do(I have zero woodworking talent).
Does anyone have anything they’d recommend, or recommend avoiding?
Mndsm
MegaDork
4/15/19 10:55 a.m.
Find an old grocery store going out of business and grab some shelving?
Rip them all to a MicroSD, and put a backup copy on a hard drive for good measure? That's what I'd do 
I stopped using optical media years ago, but this shelf looks good:
https://www.amazon.com/Maxsteel-Steel-Shelving-BluRay-Games/dp/B00005OT5X/
Duke
MegaDork
4/15/19 11:01 a.m.
We're old school enough (and have had enough trouble with DRM) to insist on hard copy media when we pay money for something. We have at least 700 CDs as well.
Ours are stored in IKEA "Billy" cabinets with glass-doors. They make DD inserts that go in between the shelf units to let you double stack them.
mtn
MegaDork
4/15/19 11:02 a.m.
When my grandfather died in the 90's, he left behind a whole bunch of records. I can still listen to them. If he'd left behind a bunch of removable media and a couple of hard drives, I probably would not have been able to do so. MicroSD may seem like it'll be around forever, but eventually it'll go the way of the zip disk. So physical media FTW, baby.
I've got three of these. They actually look pretty cool. Definitely built down to a price but that's not immediately obvious and you can stuff a LOT of CDs into a room in a non-obnoxious way. They are real wood, not particleboard. I can confirm tonight. 456 per cabinet.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001XR7G6/
I bought one from Best Buy a few years ago, it has held up fine. Not this one but similar. Holds over 1000 CD's, about 100 bucks.
Keith Tanner said:
When my grandfather died in the 90's, he left behind a whole bunch of records. I can still listen to them. If he'd left behind a bunch of removable media and a couple of hard drives, I probably would not have been able to do so. MicroSD may seem like it'll be around forever, but eventually it'll go the way of the zip disk. So physical media FTW, baby.
The devices failing would be the most likely culprit to keep you from listening to those records - which is why it's important to keep backups and monitor the health of the device they're stored on. MicroSDs are irrrecoverable if they fail, but have the advantage of being very resilient against death by aging. Also unless you choose some oddball medium like zip disks, you'll have no trouble accessing files for decades to come. I could probably get the parts together to read a 5 1/4 floppy at home if I had to. And even if I couldn't, I could buy the equipment to do it for under $200 (and I'll be hoarding those 5 1/4 drives now that I see how much they're worth).
Zip disks weren't really that much of an oddity in the mid-90's, they were probably the most common way to transfer large files without burning a CD. I also worked with some weird optical rewriteable discs a few years earlier, those were a lot weirder. You say confidently that there will be no problem for decades, but my experience over the past few decades has shown this to be not the case. We all have those boxes of obsolete technology kicking around.
Meanwhile, the CDs (or the records) just sit there and don't need constant backup and health monitoring. You can listen to an album that was pressed a century ago if you'd like, even if it was just sitting in a closet all that time.
One of the things on my to-do list is to try to recover some old newsletter files from 2003, which is going to involve digging into a hard drive that was removed from a Windows 95 computer and somehow reconstructing the newsletter from whatever layout program created them. If we had printed copies, this wouldn't be necessary.
I would start ripping them. CDs / DVDs start to degrade over time.
In reply to Grtechguy :
While they do, the degradation in ripped storage formats is likely to be faster than the degradation of the physical disks. Try playing a DivX container these days without digging around too much, for example. And that's before we get to disk issues, incompatible OS upgrades, reproduction quality issues and all that fun stuff.
Interestingly enough it looks like properly stored vinyl records might beat CD's longevity.
Keith Tanner said:
Meanwhile, the CDs (or the records) just sit there and don't need constant backup and health monitoring. You can listen to an album that was pressed a century ago if you'd like, even if it was just sitting in a closet all that time.
Grtechguy said:
I would start ripping them. CDs / DVDs start to degrade over time.
This, especially burned CDs. Stamped CDs (the type you generally buy) are much more durable, but burned CDs will start to rot within a decade. And if anyone thinks tapes last a long time, that tells me that you don't live in the swampass latitudes. Few forms of storage can be trusted to sit unattended on a shelf and hold data over time in any random home environment.
Yes, big difference between burned CDs and stamped ones. One's designed to have a certain amount of volatility, the other is more like a vinyl record in terms of production.
If you want to have an interesting chat, corner an archivist and get him/her going on media. Anything that relies on magentism (video tape, audio tape, hard drives) is dead meat in the long term.
GameboyRMH said:
Rip them all to a MicroSD, and put a backup copy on a hard drive for good measure? That's what I'd do
I stopped using optical media years ago, but this shelf looks good:
https://www.amazon.com/Maxsteel-Steel-Shelving-BluRay-Games/dp/B00005OT5X/
The 12-tier version of this is on the top of the list so far, but reading some of the negative reviews there are multiple reports/pics of the metal shelving bending under load.
Keith Tanner said:
When my grandfather died in the 90's, he left behind a whole bunch of records. I can still listen to them. If he'd left behind a bunch of removable media and a couple of hard drives, I probably would not have been able to do so. MicroSD may seem like it'll be around forever, but eventually it'll go the way of the zip disk. So physical media FTW, baby.
I've got three of these. They actually look pretty cool. Definitely built down to a price but that's not immediately obvious and you can stuff a LOT of CDs into a room in a non-obnoxious way. They are real wood, not particleboard. I can confirm tonight. 456 per cabinet.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001XR7G6/
I’d scrolled right past these because they wouldn’t hold enough discs, but damn these do look solid. Unfortunately I don’t have the width to place 2 of them next to each other & with the enclosed drawers stacking them wouldn’t work either.
Keith Tanner said:
If you want to have an interesting chat, corner an archivist and get him/her going on media. Anything that relies on magentism (video tape, audio tape, hard drives) is dead meat in the long term.
Definitely. A subject for another time, but look into the archiving of video games. Its brutally complicated from a hardware, software, and legal standpoint.
The beauty hard storage is, 700+ CDs on a hard disk or flash memory can be duplicated numerous times with ease. There are also many ways to configure things so that can happen automatically. And many services that will retain the backup for you. I think google music does 50,000 songs for free.
But as far as what the OP asked for: Go on CL, search for "CD rack" or something, and bu something for nearly free. Shame the OP is not in NC, I have 2 bookcases that would do the job easily he could have for free.
I have zero wood working talent but I've managed to build some useful furniture with a circular saw and drill. By now I probably have like 2.5% woodworking talent. Picking up free furniture and modifying/reinforcing it has been working out for me. I have a set of steel bookshelves that I bought on Craigslist years ago for $80. Felt like I overpaid at the time but they are pretty much indestructible. I've become a fan of steel or chrome wire shelving wherever I can use it, the units I have can be completely disassembled with no tools and the individual pieces are very light.
I have a lot of CD's but I don't actually play music from them. Buying a CD these days is often cheaper than buying from iTunes or other digital formats. I rip the discs as soon as I get them and then put them into storage. If I somehow lose the digital copy I just get the disc out again and make a new one.
Edit- I just looked at the "Atlantic Maxsteel" shelving on Amazon. It looks like the shelves only have a vertical edge on the sides and back, not the front. The chrome wire shelving I use at home looks exactly the same, except that it has that inch or so of reinforcement on all four sides. That may be why the shelves are bending when loaded.
TopNoodles said:
I have a lot of CD's but I don't actually play music from them. Buying a CD these days is often cheaper than buying from iTunes or other digital formats. I rip the discs as soon as I get them and then put them into storage. If I somehow lose the digital copy I just get the disc out again and make a new one.
Ditto. The funny thing is that Amazon often offers "autorip", which means you get a free digital version to download and play immediately. You save by buying the physical media and get a (mostly) immutable and DRM-free backup, and if you have Prime then Amazon will often throw you a buck towards digital purchases for choosing non-expedited shipping. You just don't lose other than the fact that you now have to house your physical backups.
BTW, you can put a lot of cased CDs in a copy paper box. They're a pain to find later but if you're just looking for cold storage it's the way to go.
