Plain and simple - usually made of plastic, wood and/or wire.
Helix - usually made of metal
Rotating - usually made of wood and/or plastic

Sorting Your Rack

• If you are like me, you buy new CD's every week. Someday soon your huge CD rack will not be big enough to fit all your CD's in. Then what do you do? Buy another? You better hope that the shop still sells that model, otherwhise your Feng Shui will be screwed by non matching CD racks.
• Damn Limited Edition promo CD's never fit the Jewel Case sized spaces in a typical CD rack. Nor do many double CDs.
• CD singles come in half width cases. Placing these in a CD rack can result in less than optimal space usage, which is a bad thing (tm)

Why go through all this hassle when a simple shelf will do the same job, for less money? You can also store your minidiscs, DVD's, Games and Books on a shelf, unlike a CD rack. And sorting CD's is easy on a shelf.

I guess there's less money to be made in selling shelves.

Cheap, safe, easy CD rack idea:

Hang them on nails or thumb-tacks

This method has many advantages:

• By hanging vertically, they don't collect dust
• You can sort related CDs on the same nail, without scratching them all up
• By facing the label out, you can find what you want easily
• You can eliminate all those space-consuming Jewel Cases

I started doing this at my job, and it's worked out great...no more stacks of cases and envelopes to sort through, and we can find what we are looking for pretty fast.