So guys, one of the big questions in life. How do you guys sort your collections? So far, I’m too lazy to sort mine, but I really have to at some point. The old “I sort of know where on the shelf or in which stack on the ground the record could be” method gets kind of annoying. Talking about organization within a reasonably defined genre.
I’ll certainly sort by label (seems most intuitive to me - or to the way my memory works), but how do I sort the labels. Thought about sorting by country, which still seems a good idea overall, but not really perfect.
So, give me your two cents, I’m sure someone among you must have some kind of order in their collection.
I have all my records tracked on discogs and have setup a number of different genre labels. So, I have stuff like disco house, emotional deep house, hard house, hard techno, melodic techno, etc. And I try to keep all my records sorted that way as well.
Unfortunately when I moved, my records got a bit mixed up, so I now have the big process of physically organizing them, and I’ve been too lazy. It’s actually kind of nice, because when I’m in the mood to mix, I grab a stack of records that may have something in them that I wouldn’t have previously combined.
I gave up trying to categorise the line between techno and house, so I gave up. Now i just think of it as a spectrum, if its housier it goes on the top shelf, if its techier it goes on the bottom shelf.
This way its easy to change the categorisation if the way i feel about the track changes.
I organised it by genre, then label name, and then each label collection into date order (newest at the back). A lot of people had portfolios of various labels work and arranging them chronologically made more sense. Also, a lot of house and trance in the mid to late 90’s was almost the same speed so I never really bothered making genre sections out of my “club” stuff and stuck to label/date order only.