Digital libraries can seem somewhat unmanageable, because there is little physical affordance. You have this deep database of music, and stuff might get dumped into it and never listened to. Physical media, on the other hand, jumps out at you. And of course, digital collections have an unfortunate habit of growing very rapidly, far beyond our ability to listen to them.

I used to trade in crappy CDs or stuff I was tired of and buy good, new stuff. But my iTunes library just grows and grows. (As a musical obsessive, I need to fight the tendency to make my personal iTunes library be the Earth repository of good and important music. I’ve already given up on the audiophile aspect of it, having realized that even the highest quality lossless CD rip is nothing compared with master tape quality, so why bother?— but I digress.))

All this is a way of saying that deleting artwork is the exactly wrong approach. Coverflow and tools like clutter— and maybe Delicious Library if they ever get around to it— offer physical-like ways of interacting with non-physical objects. Artwork is the only physical way we have of interacting with music. A better approach is to make sure you have all of your artwork, and then use coverflow to randomly select stuff to listen to. If it’s terrible, delete it.

I cannot accept your assertion that the act of reproduction is obscene. I think, once again, we have a problem with framing.

The physical object, the CD, is not the thing. Paper, plastic and metal - all media that holds a reproduction of the image, audio, and perhaps video. All of these are not simple things themselves. They are just the container of the captured, manipulated, altered items, created to meet the desired end result of the producer.

I agree, a simple text and file listing is unsatisfying, but that’s simply an interface issue. And if clutter is the real issue, the CDs are the things that must go, not the file copies, which can be stored in virtually no space at all.

I find that iTunes Coverflow is an excellent improvement in the browsable interface - and it will be even better when it extends to the entire liner notes and web connectible information. In much the same way that the PDF recreates the full page layout of the printed item, an interface that allows me to see, manipulate, and sort thru music and video in a comforting physical analog seems ideal.

I read The Library of Babel before I knew about the Internet, and when I learned about the internet I knew that it was what Borges was describing in 1941.

If we want to perfectly mimic our former use of CDs, we need a non-flat coverflow, hierarchical one, at least a stack. Browsing linearly 350 albums left to right is really different from having 4 or 5 good and recent CDs that you want to listen (the stack), and not really relevant for me. With Leopard Apple introduced stacks in the dock, maybe they should provide something similar in iTunes. The best UI would be something like a mindmap, maybe generated by tracking from what genre or artists you’re moving to (smart playlists). I’d like to see that in my music player, amarok. Maybe it will be possible with plasma in KDE 4…

The advantage of the shelf, for me, is partially the stacking of the visual information, and partially the ability to see titles I’d forgotten about in proximity.

Not just “titles” as in words, but also the covers of mix CDs and typography on CD spines, and even meaningful cracks and stains from cut-out bin stickers and road trips.

It might be possible to emulate something like that using clouds of tags or something, but I respond to CD cases for more reasons than just the artwork.

I’ll have to look into that Coverflow business, but I tend to accumulate lots of mp3s without lots of disc space, so cover art is often deleted for the sake of space. Part of my clutter problem is clutter in the virtual realm - files I sort of keep around thinking I might listen to ‘em once or twice… sometime… maybe put on a mix CD for someone who’d like it more than I do….

The same reasons, or similar enough, to the rationales I maintain for keeping so damn many books. Only these computer files seem to replicate much more quickly.