His Deeds Are Dust

1500 CDs in jewel cases

It took me several months to rip my 1500 or so CDs to a network drive, from where I can stream them wirelessly to my Squeezebox Classic. I’m very happy with that solution.

Now, the problem becomes “what do I do with the CDs?” You can see from the picture that they take a lot of space. I’ve been searching for a way of storing the CDs and artwork without the jewel cases.

I eventually settled on the DiscSox CD Pro Sleeve and ordered 1500 of them. Six evenings of work and three broken fingernails later, I’ve transferred about 1300 CDs into the sleeves, giving me 200 for expansion purposes. The other CDs in my collection are either CD singles, which don’t save me much space in sleeves, or in Digipacks, and I don’t want to destroy artwork while getting rid of the jewel cases.

So, what are the scores on the doors?

Pros

• The entire contents of the original jewel case is preserved: CDs (one or two), booklet and tray insert. The tray insert and spines go in the back of the sleeve, unfolded. The sleeve will take even chunky booklets, though the manufacturing tolerances are such that you’ll find it easier to push a thick booklet into some sleeves than others.
• Averaged over a large stack of CDs, with various thicknesses of booklet, CDs in CD Pro Sleeves will store in one third of the space of jewel cases, which is a substantial improvement.
• The sleeves are tight enough that CDs don’t slip out, while the cut of the sleeve ensures that they are easily removed and stored.
• I don’t intend moving CDs in and out of these sleeves very often, but the inner pocket is a kind of fabric, so the playing and label surfaces seem well protected.
• As my purpose for these is archiving, and the sleeves are going into boxes, what is important to me is that the sleeves are made of polypropylene and won’t stick together.

Cons

• These aren’t cheap, even in bulk. I bought 60 packs, each of which contains 25 sleeves, which cost $717, but MM Designs don’t have a European distributor, so shipping from the United States cost $130 and I got hit by an £84 charge for delivery at this end, which was the import duty from UK Customs plus a cheeky £13 administration charge from Parcelforce.

All in all, I’m very happy with my purchase. I’d be happier if MM Designs had a European distributor, but I won’t need to reorder for quite a while.

In 1997, I bought a new PC, and specified that I wanted a SuperDisk drive on it. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The LS-120 drive was a reasonable alternative to the Zip drive, and it had the advantage of being able to read 3½” floppy disks as well as the 120 MB SuperDisks, at nine times the speed of a normal floppy drive. I had one at home, my mate CMoS bought one too, and we bought a new web development PC for work with a third drive.

This all made sense until we discovered the shortcomings of the disks and drives. We’d buy disks, write them on the work PC, then take them home and find that we couldn’t read them. After a while, you could be unlucky enough to not even read disks on the machine you’d used to write them. We sighed heavily and moved onto writing CD-Rs instead.

Moving on a decade, I’ve recovered my old PC from under the bed in the guest bedroom and set about reading my old SuperDisks. Rather than fire up the old Windows 95 box, I moved the Matsushita LS-120 drive into my current desktop PC, running Fedora 9 Linux. I still have ten SuperDisks, and I know that one of them contains the contents of a bunch of old floppy disks that I thought, ten years ago, would be better off consigned to a single disk. Ho hum. Those floppy disks contained a load of Type 1 fonts that I made, the PostScript files that I used to design and test them and the programs, written in VAX Pascal, that I used to build them.

Of the ten SuperDisks, two turned out to be unreadable, but the remaining eight had a just a single read error, corrupting a zip file containing some programs from my day job, so no real loss. All in all, I’ve recovered 300 MiB of old work, fonts and photographs. I must confess, I’m shocked and impressed at the success rate.

The recovered work is being stored on the hard drive of my desktop PC, being burned to a CD and squirrelled away on my ReadyNAS. I’m not making that mistake again!