Someone Invent a Better One

It's 2008, and nobody makes a decent, affordable CD organizer. Whom do I kill as punishment for this monumental failure?

I have between 400 and 500 CDs. I want to store them out of sight, against a wall. I do not want a heavy particleboard cabinet. I want to pay under a hundred dollars. There is nothing out there anywhere that will work.

There are tons of organizers for people willing to throw out their jewel cases. What kind of idiot buys a thing like that? You pay good money for album art and little pamplets and so on, and in order to use one of these organizers, you have to throw all that stuff out or, worse, use up an even larger amount of storage to contain it. And if you ever change your storage method, you get to spend a day putting every CD back in its box. Do these people take me for a goddamn moron?

Even funnier, the idiots who make CD storage invariably advertise the number of CDs you can store WITHOUT cases. So you see ads that say things like "UP TO 500 CDs," and then it turns out that if you keep the cases on, it's more like 15 CDs.

Here's what we need. A metal cabinet, just like a filing cabinet, sized for CDs. No heavy, ugly fake wood. The drawers are about six inches deep. You pull them out, and facing up in the drawer, you see three or four rows of CDs in their cases. There are a few things out there sort of like this. If you get one big enough to hold a reasonable amount of music, it's so expensive you might as well go ahead and build a dedicated CD room onto your house.

Yes, you can buy CD organizers that fit in existing file cabinets. Great idea. Except that the drawers are around 10" deep, and the organizers don't use it all. And--this is the really funny part--they charge at least twenty bucks per organizer, and each one holds around 20 jewel cases. So for my collection, five hundred bucks, not including the half-empty cabinet.

A while back, I mounted shelves on the back of an empty closet, to hold books I didn't know what to do with. I think I'm going to have to add three shelves for CDs and be done with it. The alternative is a crappy storage unit out in the room, where dust will get on the CDs and it will be an eyesore. Filing cabinets aren't pretty, but they look a hell of a lot nicer than big open CD racks.

Here's an example of the kind of cabinet that should be available, in metal, for $75. I can't believe someone had the gall to put a $360 price tag on an ass-ugly piece of cardboard on wheels. Whoops! I'm wrong! It's wood! But it's even uglier than most cardboard furniture, so it doesn't help.

I hate to spend a lot of money on CD storage, because within 5 years, all CDs will be considered garbage. We'll have better digital music, and it will be easier to store. I don't know how we'll do it; it's just an obvious prediction based on common sense. Here's a company that makes really nice metal cabinets for over four hundred bucks. That's insane. Five years from now, I'll be wheeling it out to the trash.

Particle board furniture is one of the great curses of the population explosion. There isn't enough real wood to go around now, so we literally sit and work on cardboard. It's all cheap, and it's all crap. In all likelihood, even the lid of my gorgeous, high-end grand piano is cardboard. I hate it. Give me real metal over fake wood any day.