Periodically, Karen and I gather all the CDs in the house into the sitting room. We then go through them all, selecting a dozen to go in the kitchen, a dozen to go in the bedroom, a couple of dozen to go into my room of great wonder and magic, and about 40 to go in the sitting room. The remainder are tucked away on the bottom shelf of the bookshelf, where the sofa prevents access.
This afternoon, we did it slightly differently. As we have ripped every single CD album in the house to MP3, our needs are slightly different. There is no need to have any CDs in the sitting room (as we can plug the iBook into the hifi and play MP3s over the network (as we are doing right now)) or the room of great wonder and magic (as that’s where the MP3 server is).
So we added a new category – “Discard”. This is generally for (a) duplicates, from before we met and (b) stuff that we have ripped to MP3, but which we wouldn’t miss if the MP3 archive went for a Burton. The process has resulted in a Discard pile of 100 CDs (about 20 of which are singles).
It’s a very liberating feeling. You should try it sometime.
UPDATE: One of the CDs which we (I think) decided should go for the “Discard” pile is 23rd Street Lullaby by Patty Sciatica Scialfa. So I’m upstairs, hitting the random button on CrazyGoat until it chooses an album that I want to listen to, and this album comes up, so I figure why not listen. At least every other song is about New York. It’s making me incredibly awaysick.