Storing CDs

I'm revisiting the idea of storing CDs and the best way to do it. Right now, thanks to no foresight into the planning of my CD reconversion, I have CD cases that are empty, CD cases that are not empty, 30+ spindles of 100 CDs each, 3 3-ring binders that came with the CDs I bought from at NCYC in Indy back in November 2013, and other miscellaneous piles of music. I need a consolidated way to organize my music because if I wanted to find Metallica's "Death Magnetic" or Lamb of God's "Sacrament" or Van Halen's "OU812", I would have no idea where to look. I thought about using a user-defined field in Windows Media Player, but the problem with that is I don't really want to be tied to a proprietary software. I don't consider myself a likely candidate for using Ubuntu or a Mac on a daily basis so, unless something extremely odd happens, I will continue to use Windows. That said, my fear is that if I do add a user-defined field to WMP, I would lose that information if I needed, for some reason, to switch to a different tool.

I googled "storage for massive cd collection" and read this, but I was underwhelmed. I was equally underwhelmed with this article.

Products don't seem to be jumping out at me either. There's this binder system where you get 6 binders, each holding 48 CDs, for $58.99. That's 288 CDs. I have 4000 CDs. I would need 13.88 (let's say 14) to give me 14 x 6 = 84 of these books.Yeah, that's not going to work. I am glad I didn't have pop in my mouth when I read about this system. Each drawer holds 15 CDs; 20 of these drawers would hold, yep, 600 CDs and would cost $529.80... except I would need 7 orders of 20 of these 2 drawers 7 x [20 x2] = 280 drawers, which would cost $3708.60 to store my 4000 CDs in groups of 15 in 280 drawers.

Just for the record, even if I had $3708.60 laying around, burning a hole in my pocket, I wouldn't spend it on 280 drawers!

I bit the bullet and posted an inquiry to Facebook. My friend Phil replied that he used this product: http://shop.spacesavingsleeves.com/main.sc, which look promising. You can buy 1000 sleeves for $160 (roughly) so I'd need to invest $640 to put all my CDs in this system.