A music library on 4 disks

Our CD player died a few months ago.  It wasn't anything special, but it was a five disk changer, which was nice because it meant I could park a few disks in it for a while without getting completely sick of them.  Anyway, now it's dead and so not much use.

For a little while we just didn't listen to music.  It wasn't hard.  We had just had a baby and there wasn't much time for leisure anyway.  When we started to miss it, we looked into getting it fixed and found that, as is so common these days, it would cost almost as much to repair it as we originally paid for it.  We looked into replacing it, but everyone is selling (one disk) DVD players these days.

The DVD player!  I had forgotten that it could play CDs.  So we decided just to use the DVD player to listen to CDs.

This had its drawbacks, the biggest being that it could only hold one CD.  Most people would have bought an iPod to solve this problem long before it got to this, but we're too cheap.  We persisted for a while.

Somewhere along the line we got a new computer with a DVD burner.  I don't know what we expected to use our DVD burner for, but we got it anyway, then kind of forgot about it.   Eventually we remembered that our DVD player plays MP3s.

It took a week of concentrated disk swapping to rip our modest CD collection into the computer and another few days puzzling over why iTunes had rearranged all the songs in my "musicals" playlist when I burned them to CD as a test.  I never did figure it out, but decided to persist and burned one DVD containing a third of our music library.  Initial tests were promising.  For some reason, the renaming problem that occurred on the CD did not occur on the DVD, and the directory structure was surprisingly useful.  I especially liked that the highest level of directories was for genre.  The only problem is that the first two albums worth of music on each of the disks skips in our DVD player, a minor detail that I will resolve by burning another few disks.

So for the past week I've been listening to music almost non-stop and haven't heard the same song twice.  I'm still not through the first disk, and I'm hearing music that I'd forgotten about and really enjoying it.

The solution's not perfect, but it's working pretty well for now, and when I do get an iPod adding music to it will be as easy as plugging it into my computer.

Update: The DVD player didn't like dealing with so many songs.  Eventually we relented and got an MP3 player (but not an iPod).