One of my after work/pre-sleep projects these days is getting my music collection (CDs, etc.) recorded onto a set of minidiscs, in order to reduce what I need to carry around when I am travelling next year (and because I don't have a working CD player apart from my laptop computer).
I haven't made it too far in this project since other interests, like watching hockey, keep intruding on my time. Still, I have a dilemma. I feel that there is no ideal solution to the problem of dividing my music into a dozen or so equal-length blocks.
I have considered a number of approaches:
1. Organize alphabetically: The benefit to this approach is that it makes finding the right disc to listen to quite easy. If I want to listen to The Flaming Lips (and I do, quite often), just grab the E-J disc, or whatever it happens to be. The problem is that if I buy a CD by ABBA that overflows the A-D disc, then I have to re-record all of my minidiscs.
2. Organize chronologically: I mean chronologically by date of acquisition, not date of release. It avoids the problem in #1, but apart from that there is no real logic to this system. Is there any reason that Wagner and Orbital should be on the same CD apart from the fact that I came into possession of both CDs at roughly the same time.
3. Organize thematically: This might work. The problem here is that finding a theme that links various artists and recordings is fairly arbitrary. One day it might seem right for Coldplay and Radiohead to be on the same disc (they are both British, after all), but another day it might make no sense at all.
The only conclusion I have drawn is that I need to go out and buy another pack or two of minidiscs, as current stock of 6 is making this problem even harder to figure out.
