Organize Your Rock Collection

On the last post I told you how today's music rocks. On this post we'll talk about how to organize your rock collection.

I've finally decided to re-organize my Rock n Roll collection chronologically. I decided on Chronology only because I like having access to certain musical eras, and for me it just makes sense, although organizing your Rock Collection Alphabetically makes sense too.

Before taking on the task of organizing, my CD collection was just a mess, with no specific method to my madness, individual bands mixed up all over the place. Elvis was schmoozing with STP and Led Zeppelin with Neil Young, it was a mess.

Organizing a Rock Collection isn't as simple as it first seems. First, I realized that my rock collection was never going to be in exact chronological order, because I wanted CD's of the same bands together. This meant that I needed to organize the hundreds of disks into their distinct bands first, organized those chronologically, until each and every band was organized, and then I needed to figure out how to put them all together. This really is a task in patience that only a Zen Master could appreciate.

If you are thinking about organizing your rock collection, here are a few tips that I learned through my own mistakes and frustration. First, do yourself a favor and make a list of all of the disks that you've got, and organize them on your computer first. Originally I surfed the web for a while looking for software that would help in organizing my CD collection and then gave up after finding no free software, I'm too cheap to spend money on software that I'll only use a few times.
After half/hour searching for software, I decided to do it manually. If you've got any suggestions on some sort of CD cataloging software, please let me know, I would love to hear about it.

Anyway, I finally got out my trusted Excel spreadsheet and started plugging away, typing each and every album that I had, and after the first hour I was pretty much ready to pull my hair out from the roots, what was I thinking? The worse part was knowing that I still needed to pull up all of each release date for every CD and this is no fun, man, absolutely no fun. My Rock Collection was becoming a mind numbing monster. But I persevered and I'm glad that I did.

After documenting every CD I owned, and organizing in on the spreadsheet, the rest was easy. It was just a matter of following the spreadsheet and putting things in order. Now I look at my Rock Collection and smile, I'm very proud of this, and best of all, everything is within easy grasp. I no longer have to fiddle around my vast CD Collection to find what I'm looking for. One thing I need to get is dividers like the ones you see in the image above, other than that it's perfect. I highly recommend that everyone organize their Rock Collection, you'll be glad you did.