PROS: Save TONS of space, lightweight, low per-unit cost.
CONS: Time-consuming for large collections, difficult to read spines.
PRICE: $15 per 100
JazzLoft.com is offering their newly re-designed Space-Saving CD sleeves this year (click here), a slight tweak on their long-running product line. For a lot of musicians and collectors, the hassle of storing hundreds (sometimes thousands) of jewel cases of your favorite CDs and/or different mixes of recording projects can be a nightmare. Jewel cases are thick, they’re heavy when you’re dealing with that type of volume, and let’s face it: they almost always crack and break. A pain for fans and studio engineers alike.
These sleeves present an ingenious alternative to all that clutter and broken plastic. Simply remove your album artwork and back tray insert and pop the disc off its hub. Now toss that jewel case in the trash, because you’ll never need it again. Place the artwork into one of your new sleeves, slide the disc into the other side, and voilà! The Space-Saving sleeves, made of 4mm thick archival polyethylene, can easily reduce the shelf-space of your collection or recording projects by about 65-75%. Your CDs now lay almost perfectly flat when the sleeves are closed, and you can still (sort of) read the spines from the side.
Converting a large collection can take some time (I speak from experience; my entire personal collection of 1,200 CDs is now housed in Space-Saving sleeves – see ‘after’ photo above), but if you don’t care about the original jewel case, and you need to reclaim the massive space your music and mixes are taking up, these might just be the solution you’ve been searching for. With a per-unit cost of about 15 cents, it’s a relatively inexpensive solution, as well. And from an aesthetic standpoint, they open and look much like a gatefold record, which a lot of users may actually find far more pleasing than the bulky, busted jewel cases of yore.