Recently I glanced over at my CD collection which at the time commanded an immense space in my living room. Having amassed over 600 physical CDs since I was 16, needless to say the collection was becoming increasingly difficult to manage and—more importantly—to enjoy. A decision was made—had to be made. I would import each of my CDs into iTunes, pack the CDs away in storage, and clear the spot on my shelves and in turn have a more manageable collection in terms of weight, physical space and usability. I set out to do this immediately, what follows is a brief run down of things I did to accomplish this massive task.

Going Digital

First things first. I had to calculate how much space was needed in order to store my CD collection digitally. I had no real way to do this, the best I could do was guesstimate. I had about fifty albums already imported at this point and I took their total size in megabytes and multiplied that by the total remaining CDs.

I came up with approximately 30GB to store the entire collection. 30 gigabytes is not that much in terms of total hard drive space for my iMac, so I figured it was on and that I could not only import the entire collection, but I wouldn’t even have to use 1/6th of my total available hard drive space, hell yeah!

On and On

Importing CDs one at a time is a very long process. It took me a little over one month to complete this task, ten at a time. Part of the reason this took so long is that I had to make sure I had the proper artwork, genre classing, ratings and equalizers for every song on every album—enter the anal.

Album artwork is a task in itself, and needs to be improved.

iTunes, didn’t have correct artwork for over 40% of my collection and of that 40%, about 25% of them didn’t have a suitable version on Amazon either, this lead me to scanning a lot of album art to use. In hindsight, I kind of wish I’d scanned every single album I own, just to have a very consistent and clean cover flow. But, I had already imported several hundred albums before I thought of that, perhaps some day I’ll go back through and do the scanning—probably not.

Genres Suck

iTunes, has a difficult time placing a great amount of records into the right genre, sometimes I was convinced that iTunes defaults to “Alternative & Punk”.

What kind of classification is that? Nothing is both Alternative and Punk, Alternative in my opinion isn’t even a genre, it’s a cop out, it’s the genre equivalent to “I can’t be arsed to think of it now”. GAH! So needless to say I had to create and manage a bunch more genres than the default choices.

More Albums More Problems

All in all, I was able to import all but two of my CDs. Both, 2Pac - All Eyez On Me (Book 2) and Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill refused to be read by the iMac and the Powerbook. I was bummed. Collection incomplete. But, with a huge thanks to Oli at My 9rules, I was able to complete my collection with the two missing albums.

“The Brady Bunch Movie” Soundtrack gathered and displayed the album artwork for “The Hills Have Eyes” Soundtrack from iTunes, WTF? I changed that no big deal, but iTunes was way off.

Some albums had issues importing and I had to eject them and reimport them to solve the issue, but it added time to the overall project.

Conclusion

Aside from the sheer amount of time it took me to complete importing and dealing with the above issues, everything else went smoothly and I now have a completely digital CD collection, lightweight, search-able, categorized and beautiful—insert sigh of relief.

Final numbers

81 Genres, 1818 Artists, 863 Albums, 1 month, 4 1/2 storage boxes 46.82 GB, 12,085 songs, 32.2 days of music.

I’m trying to get an export of albums and artists to post, but until then just know I’m not typing that shit out by hand.