So you have hundreds, maybe thousands, of CD’s and DVD’s that you have made (legally of course), how do you organize this growing mess. This is a major problem for myself, and others I imagine as well. CD and DVD burners have been around for a long time now, and I know that many people are amassing large collections of media that they have burned for many different processes. Of course some of things you can just as easily throw away because it has been obsoleted, but suppose you have a large collection of backed up games or movies? Or perhaps you create your own music mixes, or your own movies and need places to organize and store them. Where do you go to do this?

The most archaic solutions, those that we usually resort to first, involve storing the things in the original storage places. This includes the CD jewel cases or even the spindle that the things came in. In the case of the CD jewel cases you will have to either make labels for all the jewel cases for each of the CD’s or DVD’s that you put into them or you are going to just slap them on a shelf and have to go through them every single time you want something. Since making functional labels is tedious (with traditional jewel cases you have to actually put a thin label on the outside edge so you can tell what is in the CD by looking at it on a bookshelf), you end up having to go through all the CD’s or DVD’s anyway to find the one you want since you have to look at the face. The new thin jewel cases do not help this out because they don’t even offer a way to put a thin label on the edge so you can see it on a shelf. Unless you keep your whole system indexed externally, it is just a big mess. I won’t even go into keeping them on a spindle, keeping track and moving CD’s and DVD’s out of a spindle is a nightmare.

The next thing to try is to keep all the media in a notebook. These are sold all over the place. Its usually a reinforced notebook of sorts, that hold maybe four DVD’s or CD’s per page side. I have a few that hold 300 a piece. These can be moderately expensive if you buy a more durable model, and pretty cheap if you like to clean up when the damn thing falls apart. Unlike the store on the shelf model outlined above, you have an easier flip book of media to go through and it can possibly take up a lot less space. Of course unless you keep track and order them appropriately it is still a big mess to actually find what you are looking for. Sometimes this is not entirely a bad thing, for example with movies you may want to browse through them to make a choice. However, for most things this is unsophisticated and cumbersome to find an exact disc when you want it.

The Cadillac of CD and DVD Storage, though, has to be the Disk Stakka by imation. This thing is like a jukebox for your media, where you are supposed to be able to just slide in any kind of media, it adds it to a database, and keeps track of everything for you. When you want a disc, you just go to your computer and then tell it what disc you want and it pops out of the unit. When you want to add a disc it will even scan its contents and add it to your database so you know exactly what files/music are on the disc. You can then query the database, not only on the disc title, but what the actual contents are. You can even take the units and stack them on top of each other, so you can have 5 units high, hooked to your computer with one USB connection all working together to store your 500 discs. This sounds great, doesn’t it? They are fairly cheap too, at around curious problem of arriving to your door completely DOA (dead on arrival). This happened to me. Unfortunately, the second problem that exacerbates the first is that their support (which is apparently handled by memorex now) is completely terrible. I sent them two emails and did not get a reply at all. At that point I read about some of these problems (as well as another which I will mention shortly) and decided to just return the thing to the place that I bought it.

The Disk Stakka does not protect your data. It is not a long term investment. For one, it only works on Windows, and technically I would say only on XP reliably. I switched to Windows Vista recently and it would not even function on Vista x64. On Vista x86 it seemed to work, but it was touch and go (at least for some of the functionality that I could see, the unit itself was obviously mechanically defective). The lack of support scared me because when I buy 5 or 10 of these things to create a long term storage solution, I want to be able to use it for just that … the long term. Who knows when they pull the product, discontinue support, or the things stop working and I cannot retrieve my disc from the inside of the unit!

Between those issues I brainstormed a compromise between all the methods I outlined above. Discgear has a few solutions that are alright on their own, but get better if we add to them. For one, as a desktop solution (although it is a bit unwieldy for a smaller desk), is the Selector 100. It is basically a Disk Stakka that is entirely mechanical. You have an index sheet of discs that are in numbered slots. You slide the slider to the disc number that you want and then you pop the top and the disc is automatically selected and waiting for you there. Pretty nice, though you do have to keep an index. At around $35, its pretty cheap too. They also have the Studio 100, which I think is the real pearl of the collection. Now it does not have the auto-selector and popup features of the Selector 100, but you can stack them on top of each other. They look nice and are boxed shaped and fit well on shelves or anywhere. When you open it up all the DVD or CD sleeves are numbered for an index sheet that you keep. Its pretty much as easy as the Selector 100. It is also around the same price, $35, which makes it an attractive alternative to actually organizing a collection as opposed to storing it with CD booklets and binders.

Of course, the way to pull this all together is to database-ize it and actually create your own home grown CD and DVD storage utility that you have control over, is easy to use, and can manage your collection and allow you to easily find what you are looking for when you have too many discs to just have index sheets. That will be the focus of my next article, a proposal for a discgear (though it will act the same for many media storage systems) database system to organize your media collection!