Downsizing a music collection

I've become interested in simplifying my life and considering downsizing my music collection. I have almost 3,000 CD's in different genres and there is just no way that I could possibly listen to all of them ever again. I was going to start with absolute favorites (the ones I play the most frequently) and work my way down from that.

Have any of you ever tried to do this and succeeded? Did you rip favorite tracks on so-so CD's onto a hard drive or CD-R so that you would always have them? What ended up being your decision making process? I know that getting rid of my CD's is going to be hard, like the people on "Hoarders" act when they try to give up their stuff!

All suggestions are welcome!

 

I've never tried what you're attempting, though I've been finding selling, even trading CDs, getting harder and harder.
No one wants them where I am.
If they do, they pick through what they think they can sell, give you next to nothing for them, then hand you back the rest.

 

I've dumped my record collection several times over. I guess I'm not as attached as some. Finding myself with a handful of LPs, some cassettes in the mid-eighties made listening to the few items I had left a lot more musically valuable.

Your best bet is posting the good stuff on this forum.

 

I buy, sell, binge, purge, etc.etc all the time.
Do what feels right. I usally never regret selling things. If I do, I just buy them again.

 

Never tried it with music. It would leave me psychologically damaged. But I have done it with books, of which I still have several thousand. I put aside boxes of books of medium interest. If, after several months, I still hadn't touched these books, I would sell them to 2nd hand book stores, or donate them to charity. It's easier than you think.

 

Sell off your favorite piece first. After you do that, you can easily sell, buy, trade anything you want to. This hint was given to me by an old record guy in my town. He is wise.

 

I have everything rated from 1 to 5 stars on itunes. Albums can be changed one step up or down, but only after listening to an album completely. I use iTunes in random mode. If an album goes to 5, it gets deleted after a listen if it fails to go back to 4.

 

If you're like me, you will spend a considerable amount of time trying to make a decision as to what to purge, time that could be spent listening to the music you really enjoy. You can consider your large collection to be a library from which you can draw from or not. Or you can set a goal and just ditch CDs knowing they can always be replaced. Eventually, I think streaming will be so good that you probably won't need a physical product.

 

I could never do my music either. Once I get it, it stays. However, I had hundreds of books collected from when I was a kid. I had to get rid of them simply because I didn't have enough space to keep them all and they weren't being used at all by me. If I ended up moving I didn't want to drag them all with me and my parents didn't want to keep them at their house anymore. I ended up selling some to a local bookstore and donated the rest to the library so other people could enjoy them. I kept the ones I was most passionate about (and the rarer ones).

It was hard at first and I still sort of regret it but I gotta face facts - they were just sitting there collecting dust. I guess my future kids would have used them but it was just too much and there's no guarantee I'll even have kids, so it just seemed better to let other kids utilize them now.

 

I recommend ripping to hard drives and then selling them. That way you have the option of listening to them again should the desire ever arise (which it will).

You can also buy a bunch of plastic sleeves (www.jazzloft.com) and put them all in one big box and save TONS of space without having to sell them. This is what I have done and I love it. Some other forum members did it too and they like it a lot.

Or you can just move to online streaming options and listen to them that way through MOG or Spotify.

 

The one or two times I did do it, I got rid of stuff that I later missed and had to re-buy, some were considerably more expensive.

Never! To me, that is work and listening to my music is all about fun. The few times a disc went bad, I was able to rip it and make a CD-R.

Sell off doubles, get more particular about what I buy (researching well on this site before buying) and finding new ways to store what I have, usually by adding shelves and/or racks. It helps that I live alone.

Yep, each time I tried it got too successful.

 

I'd love to downsize my collection considerably, but I'm afraid it's never going to happen. Whatever titles I would choose to get rid of, I would eventually miss. Not selling any of my CDs may not be the wisest thing to do, but at least it saves me from the trouble of having to re-buy once owned and foolishly sold albums.

 

Large external hard drives can be had for fairly cheap. Ripping a large CD collection can be time consuming and mundane but, beleive it or not, can also be some fun. I've sold too many CDs back in the day that I ended up deeply regretting. Deeply. Tip: rip lossless (but for best results not .WAV) to preserve sound quality.

 

What works for me is that with many artists, either a one or two disc comp, or a 3-4 disc box set will cover things instead of all of the albums. There's been times I've had several or all of the albums by a band/artist, but realized that I didn't need everything by them. That saved some space.

 

Same here.

 

Try this: imagine you lost all your records/cds in a fire, and the insurance company gave you the money it would cost to replace everything.

Now you have the choice of spending the money on the records/cds you once had. Would you buy that album again, or not bother? If you conclude you wouldn't, then it can probably go now.....perhaps....

 

I attempted to thin out my CD collection a few years ago. I had numerous discs that I purchased just for one song, so my intention was to rip the song to my HD and sell the disc. I also separated cds that were duplicates and triplicates and planned on listening to them to make a decision which ones to keep and which ones to sell. These were all placed in a big box......

....problem is, the wife and I got our signals crossed and that box ended up getting donated to the Vet's! In that box......the entire Rush catalog up to Hold You Fire - all West German Atomics, the Original VH cd's and numerous Targets.

Hey, at least they went to a good cause, albeit unintentionally!

 

By all means, purge. It's been my experience that I feel better afterward and it frees up funds and space for new purchases.

I routinely go through my collection in an effort to keep it small and limited to quality pressings of albums I listen to and enjoy. I try to be honest about whether I actually listen to a disc, and critical as to whether I actually enjoy it. Generally speaking, if I haven't listened to it in the past year or so, or I don't think to myself, "I love this album," it's extraneous. (There are exceptions, of course; this is a general guideline for me.)

I'll set aside any discs I'm considering getting rid of, then come back a day or two later and given them a critical listen, then set them aside for a day, then give them another critical listen. At some point, I'll know if it's a disc I want to hold on to. I can't really explain how, it's just something I intuitively know. I've never regretted getting rid of anything.

I rip everything to a hard drive, so I've got backups of most stuff (though, generally speaking, I could just as easily delete the files of discs I've jettisoned because I find I don't listen to those, either. But on the other hand, storage is cheap.) This system has allowed me to keep my CD collection to about 200 or so discs, which may seem tiny to some people here but is fine by me.

 

My wife knows to steer clear of my music. Your story gave me that "cringe" body twist when I read it.


@the OP -- I would consider this from a cost perspective as well ie. selling bargain bin CD's at near zero cost versus the expensive stuff. And I would rip them all as others have mentioned (yes, it's really not legal in the US to rip and sell as it breaks copyright law, but neither is jaywalking).

I also like the idea of tossing the jackets / putting the CD's in storage units and it's what I do. Easy to transport and easy to store. But keep in mind that I don't listen to CD's anymore, except in the car - it's rip to FLAC and store the CD away. And CD's, for me, are still and option as they are just so cheap versus a lossy purchase on Amazon / iTunes - buyer's market right now.

 

This is something I know is coming but how, when and what is another story. More likely is a better storage solution. It is highly likely the candidate items for me would be worth so little that it would be an exercise in futility.

 

If you are going to unload any CDs, rip the music you like first to a hard drive. You could always listen it off the computer or a music server or burn them to CD-Rs.

Are the CDs you want to unload common or do you have any collectable pressings? That, of course, will determine the ease with which you will be able to unload them and how much you will get for them.

 

I sold off many of my cd's a couple years ago and I don't miss them. There were a couple Beatles boots that I wished I had gotten more for, but that's it. All my favorites are still around and cd's with good liners. Eventually I have to do the same with my vinyl. I have way too much and too many crappy albums taking up space where I could be putting better albums that I'll listen to more frequently. It'll be a time consuming process and I figure I'll eventually be down on my luck.

 

I have tried many times to downsize and generally haven't had much success. I'm going through an attempt right now. There's always some cds I can pull out and put in the "Bad buying decision pile" but I always wind up wanting to keep most.

A lot of time it seems to come down to availability of space. I don't have as many cds as you have, probably less than half (I have more back at my parents house that I left behind in 1994) but storage is an issue as I have little space in my current flat.

Another factor for me, is that right now, used cd stores aren't buying like they used to. So I know that I'll wind up coming back home with many of the discs I want to get rid off. So I'll either need to give them away or keep them and if I keep them I'm back to the lack of space issue.

I've been playing around with the idea of putting discs that I don't listen to that often onto my hard drive and then storing them. Perhaps without their cases to save space (using those jazz loft sleeves).

 

OP: Selling, donating, purging or whatever is fine. Ripping 3k discs to a HD takes some work but when you're done - you're free to do what you wish without looking back.

To get started rip a few valuable pieces, then sell them to fund two muti-terabyte HD's (one for backups). Then do your thing.

 

I should cull mine because we're planning to move overseas in a few years and it seems silly to take an enormous collection of stuff that won't be played. I'll probably go against the current grain and sell-off LP's mostly... at least I'll get a few bucks for those (God bless hipsters).

I've been transferring my collection (of about 7,000) CD's to Jazzloft vinyl sleeves in the past year - I have about 1,500 to go. And as I go through the shelves and drawers I very rarely find something that I roll my eyes at, "What was I thinking buying that lame album!" That doesn't mean I'll ever listen to them all again. But a collection isn't like a refrigerator full of food, it doesn't spoil... it's a totally different kind of gluttony. A library is a nice reference even if the books are never read front to back.

Time will tell.