932
That's the number of CDs my husband and I entered into our Delicious Library catalog. Yes, we are those kind of people. We not only alphabetized our CD collection, we also cataloged it, ditched the jewelboxes and organized it in booklets.
It's not that we need a database to remember what CDs we own and where they are. The joy of owning a large collection is scanning shelves or leafing through booklets and finding a CD you'd forgotten about and remembering when and where and why you got it. It's a photo album, a scrapbook, only music.
We would not have gone to great lengths to catalog our CD collection, but Delicious Library makes it easy, maybe even fun. Not that fun - it still took us two years to finish the job, with many dormant months between bouts of scanning UPCs. Based on the UPC or ASIN codes (or Artist and Title, if necessary) Delicious Library pulls up all sorts of extraneous data from Amazon.com: genres, retail price, current value, Amazon users rating.
We can organize our collection based on current value, which suggests Kiss's You Wanted The Best You Got The Best is the jewel of our CD collection with a current value of £203.40, or $314.92. (Never mind that the same album, possibly the same release, is available on Amazon for $2.98 new). Our third most valuable CD, according to Delicious / Amazon is Planete Sauvage by Alain Goraguer. It is out of print, so maybe $162.50 is... nah, I can't value digital music like that unless there's some seriously special packaging. (Thank you followers of Walter Benjamin, to whom I ask, Can digital music be rare?)
Ranked by Amazon users ratings, then alphabetically, our highest rated CDs, with a full 5 stars, start with 13th Floor Elevators's Easter Everywhere and end with The Zombies's Odyssey and Oracle. Our 4 star CDs start with Air's Talkie Walkie and end with The Zombies's Odyssey and Oracle. Yes, we have two different releases of Odyssey and Oracle, the 2004 Deluxe release preferable by 1 star to the 1998 release.
Our most well represented artists:
Miles Davis - 21 CDs (of which I'm sure only Sketches In Spain belongs to me) Richard Thompson - 9 CDs Stereolab - 8 CDs
Number of CDs starting with X:
2 - X's More Fun In The New World and Xingu, which might actually belong under E for El Combo Xingu.
Number of CDs starting with Q:
None. We have no Queen, no Q-Tip, no Quicksilver Messenger Service.
What I pulled out to listen to today:
Stereolab's Dots and Loops, which happily reminds me of being a college DJ in the mid-90s.