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How To Organize Your Record Collection


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Mine are the organized by what seems to be the common method (alphabetized by band and albums chronologically) but since not everything is easily identified my girlfriend requested a 3 ring binder with a spreadsheet.

Seems to be working pretty well... The only question now is how often to print an update.

I suppose if and when we get and iPad or tablet that would obsolete the binder.

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wow. i need to find one of those! i can call to see if they'll ship to CA, but if they did, it'd probably be awfully pricey...

i like how it looks like it's real wood, too. i prefer that to particle/fiber board.

yeah, they're just unfinished pine. the back is a thin plywood. I'm sure someone locally makes something similar enough. I've seen the same shelf design being sold at places in other cities (Chicago comes to mind right away) so it's probably reasonably common, but like I said, there's enough people making/selling unfinished furniture that you're bound to find something very similar near to you.

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wow. i need to find one of those! i can call to see if they'll ship to CA, but if they did, it'd probably be awfully pricey...

i like how it looks like it's real wood, too. i prefer that to particle/fiber board.

yeah, they're just unfinished pine. the back is a thin plywood. I'm sure someone locally makes something similar enough. I've seen the same shelf design being sold at places in other cities (Chicago comes to mind right away) so it's probably reasonably common, but like I said, there's enough people making/selling unfinished furniture that you're bound to find something very similar near to you.

perhaps, but the thing with bostonwood is that their prices are great for it being real wood and made in the US. it's hard to find new, real wood furniture for less than a couple hundred. i found a place in WA that also has unfinished pine CD and LP racks and they ship around the US but they cost twice as much. might have to go that route since shipping is free, but i'll poke around a bit more to see if i can find something in southern CA.

thanks for posting that link though. didn't know unfinished pine was an option, but now that i do, it's what i'll be looking for.

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perhaps, but the thing with bostonwood is that their prices are great for it being real wood and made in the US. it's hard to find new, real wood furniture for less than a couple hundred. i found a place in WA that also has unfinished pine CD and LP racks and they ship around the US but they cost twice as much. might have to go that route since shipping is free, but i'll poke around a bit more to see if i can find something in southern CA.

thanks for posting that link though. didn't know unfinished pine was an option, but now that i do, it's what i'll be looking for.

no, I absolutely agree, I bought so many of them because they were always clearly a great deal. the 160-cap CD racks were $15 when I was in high school and $20 when I was in college. it was a no-brainer at the time.

their cubes are great for vinyl too: http://www.bostonwood.com/cubes.html

I used to have all my vinyl in 2 of those when my collection was much less substantial. it's really blown up in the past 2 years or so and now I've got 4 sections of my 1x5 Expidit filled.

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Didn't realize this thread would turn into an actual conversation. Just started it because i thought it was funny there's a video and how-to on how to do something so individual to the person doing it, like organizing vinyl.

Honestly, mine are all alphabetical by artist. The individual records by that artist i try to have in chronological order, but they never stay that way. If I have any extra variants, I have those all together on two squares in my expedit. i keep stuff i want to get rid of in another square.

As for whether it is better to have albums by genre or just alphabetically, i think organizing all my records by genre would just be a headache. if i had a bunch of jazz records or DJ singles, i could see keeping those together in sections, but genres are just so hard to categorize. in a store, you're looking through tons of records to find the ones you want. at home, i want all of my records and i know what i have. alphabetical is the way to go.

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alpha by artist for my 12s.

my 7s and 10s are out of order on purpose though. I like digging through them to find something I'm looking for and usually end up finding 2-3 I forgot about or are more excited about.

Can we start arguing about sorting left to right vs. right to left now?

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How do people who collect variants sort each variant of a record? Alphabetical by color? Chronologically by pressing date? ROY G BIV?

me, I'd do it chronologically by pressing date if I definitely knew the pressing dates.

I only have four records where this would apply, and two are reasonably obvious: I have an original R.E.M. Chronic Town from 1982 and the 2010 RSD pressing, and then a 1997 Sleater-Kinney Dig Me Out and a 2008 one that IWVT sent me by accident and let me keep anyway. There's also Comeback Kid's Wake the Dead that I think are two different colors from the same pressing run, though I'm not sure. I just keep them in the order I bought them: white, then red. The last one is Coheed and Cambria's Second Stage Turbine Blade, which are both from 2011 - I have the "regular" green vinyl one and then I have the black tour-only one, and again I keep these in the order I bought them, though you could think of the green one as having been "an earlier pressing" because I think it sold out before the tour even started. The Coheed records are easy to tell apart though because the jackets are different colors.

Having multiple versions of the same pressing is the only situation I can think of where I'm not sure exactly how I'd sort. This would almost have to be because of color variants, so I guess maybe I'd do white -> ROYGBIV -> black?

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  • 1 year later...
Guest realtalk

This thread is too highly technical and intellectual. Hearing different viewpoints on this matter has shattered my reality and belief in all that is true.

Solution? Heading to the incinerator to melt these fuckers down. Returning to my comfy knowledge of a flat Earth and a one-size-fits-all society.

Kthx4ruiningmylife

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mine are in kinda alphabetical order, I don't sweat them being in order.  then there is a group of new stuff that moves into the area right next to my record player as i listen to stuff.  once they move away from the record player they get put into my "kinda alphabet order".  

 

odd sizes are by themselves.  7 inches are kinda in order too, but in boxes.

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My records are grouped by artist, in order of which bands I think should go next to each other/which bands I associate with others. That's about it. No rhyme or reason to where they are on the shelf.

 

For example if I'm looking for Brian Bonz, I look next to Kevin Devine. If I'm looking for The Band, I look next to Bob Dylan. This system only works for me - if anybody else is looking for something in my collection, there's no chance they'll find it.

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Alpha by artist, then chronologically. I thought about doing genres, but decided against it since there would be too much crossover.

Right now everything is in boxes semi-alphabetical, so I will be filing soon. The plan is to export my Recordnerd list to Excel, sort it aplha-chron by size, then start filing.

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How do people who collect variants sort each variant of a record? Alphabetical by color? Chronologically by pressing date? ROY G BIV?

hmmm.jpg

 

if there are different variants in the same press, i'll keep them out of order so i am more likely to grab a different color each time i take it out to spin it.

 

and, along with many others here, i do: alphabetical by band, chronological by album, and only chronological by press if the jacket art has been updated or changed

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alphabetical by band, then alphabetical by album title. if the band name starts with "The" I organize by the next word. For example, The Beatles are in the "B's" not the "T's." If I have multiple variants, I start with rarest first press on the left, with the most common repress to the right. I always only spin the most common variant.

HOWEVER, I am heavily debating putting my Deathwish vinyl in their own section. Eventually, I'd like to just have a massive Deathwish and Hydra Head selection.

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