Ive come to the same scenario... Ive just seperated things into different piles.. Things I know would be worthwhile to put on Ebay, things to sell in bulk, things to sell to friends for super cheap, and things to give to friends for free. So far so good but I went over board and listed a bit too much stuff on ebay which is now taking time away from my regular work. Once this batch is cleared out then I'll make another trip to my storage and start again.
i know the situation well. over this last summer i sold 90% of my cd collection on ebay. i listed everything in one day, not realizing the stuff would sell as fast as it did. i could barely keep up! the local wal-mart could not stock cd-sized padded envelopes fast enough, i literally had to hit up the surrounding towns and horde all of them!
What were you getting for prices? A goal for next winter is to rip all my CDs and DVDs and sell them off. Have everything stored on a large drive. Advantages would be that they'd take up less space and I'd be able to find anything instantly.
My father is the ultimate clutter freak to the point where it is scary. I hope that I don't end up like him. Papers everywhere and I mean everywhere. Kitchen table, dining room table, just covered with stuff from the mail and clippings and crap. Stacks of newspapers in the living room. You can't even find a place to sit down without moving some stack of paper. Of course it's all absurd cause he can't find anything. Hopefully because of technology and computers, I won't end up like that.
Funny .. this is exactly what I am doing right now.. My friend is a cd fiend so Im selling him my whole collection. As soon as I can back up all the cds on my external hard drive they are gone! Im hoping to walk away with a new ipod ready car stereo with that transaction. Im toying with the idea to buy up a bunch of those small memory chips to store music on and have a miniture cabinet to store them all.
More chips...a new cabinet...You're just replacing old clutter with new. If you've got a ton of music files (100's of GB worth), just buy a single external hard drive. If you've only got a few dozen GB or less, you can put everything onto a couple of SD cards.
Digitalizing everything is great to get rid of clutter. I need to do that to my DVDs. Maybe build a media system to store everything. Maybe also just take pics of all the toys I have and sell them. Start a digital collection of toys. Lol. It'll be cheaper. I don't collect toys. I collect pics of toys.
Yah for sure... the mini chip collection would just be a joke as to music collecting. I dont see myself going that route since chips would add up. Ive already got the external hard drive so... no need.
I can't believe that 15 years ago I used to subscribe to magazines which would end up in piles and clutter. I had probably 8 years of Wired and MacUser and god knows what else. When I moved, I had to struggle to dump my stupid collection of Wired magazines thinking that they were cool and I'd reference them again. I ended up keeping the first issue for historical interest and dumped the rest. I've rediscovered the city library and realized that I don't need to own books or magazines, that I can just borrow them or read them there. Or read the online versions of magazines and newspapers. I have a huge art book collection but I won't part with that as they're so beautiful and to me, they don't bring clutter into my life as they're shelved and I like the atmosphere that they create. I also can't find many of them in the library system.
Just done a similar deal with boxes of old cassette tapes from my college days . . . I had no way of playing 'em so made a list and started keeping an eye out for 'em via Torrents, iTunes and putting the word out amongst friends. I'm probably 70% through the list in a couple of weeks, 4 boxes of junk lighter and a whole bunch of readily accessible memories to hand. CD's are definitely next!
Digitizing everything will save me from the clutter and crap. The only hassle is that you need to have redundancy and backups or else you're hosed if a drive goes down. On the plus side, HD space is so cheap (I saw an external terabyte drive for $90 the other day) that having mirrored drives is ever more affordable. I have a 100 CD player that I never use anymore. I have a turntable that I keep holding onto that I think I'll set up one day to revisit vinyl. I've been holding onto that stupid turntable for 12 years now and still haven't set it up again. Someone put out a Playstation 1 out by the trash in my building. Without thinking, I grabbed it. Gonna play retro games, I thought. Next morning, I looked at it and thought WTF? And put it back out with the trash. Constant struggle. Fortunately, I don't have a garage or storage unit.
Also... from what Ive gathered you can upload your whole music collection to Grooveshark.com. It can then be accessed anywhere in the world. Im gonna start uploading soon. Only bad thing is you cant download it back. Multiple back ups would be ideal though.. Ive had one too many hard drive crashes and learned my lesson.
i have sold a lot of my CDs on ebay,,,with varying results... by far,,the highest selling items were obscure jazz & soundtracks...and CDs which were long out-of-print (mid-80s pressings) or in limited edition packaging... really obvious things that catered to a broader & younger audience,,,went for very little in general (i think most people up to a certain age have downloaded most everything from their past collection at this point)
Carry on with the 'people of a certain age' angle and I'll start Googling 'revoking UK citizenship' websites . . .
hey man,,no skin off my back,,it's official......... these colours can't fade now actually,,i am going backwards from the "people of a certain age",, all the CDs i have sold on ebay have been recently re-acquired on vinyl...alot of it i originally bought on CD after selling off a huge lot of records... i am still paying my debts from that dark day i purged my vinyl collection just after i graduated high school...regret it to this day...
We are purging right now. From CDs to books to old toys, clothes and old but functional electronics. The hardest thing about doing this is getting started. I keep going back to the garage looking at those boxes and just closing the door. Procrastination is the hardest hurdle to get past when comes to such an undertaking.
I can't throw away anything. One day they'll find me dead at 80, buried under a stack of newspapers from 2015. I will dribble a basketball with my free arm to keep myself entertained.
on average about $5 each for most of my stuff. quite a bit more for some of the more rare discs, and towards the end of it all, i started slashing prices on the last few dozen just because i wanted to get rid of it all...i kept a few of my favs, and the rest all got put on an external hard drive. saved soooo much room dropping that load off. now i may need to move to the dvd's soon. i have this enormous two-sided shelf that i bought from a local video rental store that was going out of business. to get the full use out of both sides i had to put the thing in the dead center of the room. it's kinda annoying to work around. i might have to start working those onto the ehd, but i might need to get quite a bit more comp space first....
