How Much Music

83 gigs. I am on a never-ending quest to listen to the music that I don’t actually know well. When I listen, I rate it. The rest of the time I listen to shuffles of what I’ve rated.

Not sure how this worked back in Plato’s day but I’m sure the methods were similar.

Damn, only 42 gig here. Guess I need to increase my rate of acquisition…

You should also indicate the sampling rate. I total about 50 gigs. Most of mine is 192KB, but I have bought some at Amazon’s MP3 store, which is sampled at a higher rate.

I thought I was bad, but I only have 15 days.

I have 40,156 tracks, 155.48 gigs, 105 days, 1 hour, 10 minutes and 33 seconds.

I knew you were too law-abiding for any illegal downloads, but how much of the whole did you buy online?

Only about 20g… none downloaded (all taken from CDs purchased). What goes on the iPod are either things I really, really like listening to or things that I just bought and want to get to know better (I listen during my commute and the iPod is just easier than carrying around all those CDs). Guess that makes me a hopeless Luddite.

Incidentally, here in Switzerland downloading is not illegal, only sharing is. Or so I was told. Thus the BitThief, free-riding client. I’m pretty sure their highminded explanation of why they decided to develop it is completely bogus.

I’ve got 6360 songs for just over 20 days of listening. Some of it is ripped from albums I bought, but the largest bumps in library size have come from fair-use swaps with friends who visited with their laptops. I’m not a completist and am happy to toss all the bad songs from an album to avoid cruft. I assign ratings to everything to make party shuffle and iPod-loading more efficient and pleasing.

12,122 “songs,” 62.9 days, 53.78 GB

The reasons for the numbers looking so odd:

1) I listen to very little music that would be recognizable to most people as “songs,” in the standard singer/songwriter-with-a-guitar-combo mold.

2) I have a large number of random and amusing audio clips that are less than 30 seconds in length. They break up the monotony when used in smart playlists, but they artificially inflate the song count.

3) I listen to a lot of vintage (pre-1935) music, which is generally encoded at lower bit rates.

4) I listen to a lot of classic radio transcripts,* radio dramas, and audiobooks, which vary from 1/2 to 2 hours, and are recorded at very low bit rates (e.g. 28.8 kpbs or even lower).

Most of my digital music collection is either PD (pre-1928 recordings; pre-1976 radio), OOP/orphaned vinyl, or production (“canned”) music. A small amount was purchased from sites like iTunes or eMusic.

I suppose some small amount of the music in my collection is technically illegal, but it represents music that has zero profit potential for the industry and will never be rereleased commercially. So it’s a choice between dodgy downloads and not being able to hear it at all.

* If you’re at all a fan of classic jazz and swing, go to archive.org and search for “live aircheck.” Hours and hours and hours of Basie, Ellington, Fats Waller, Goodman, etc., performing live without the constraints of the recording studio, never released commercially, and all free, legal, and aboveboard.

19.7 days, much of it downloaded. I also have some stuff on CD that I haven’t bothered to rip yet.

only 8GB because I have an old computer and have run out of disk space

I have 11gb, just under 9 days, but I rarely listen to music on my computer. I use it to store the music from CDs which I want to hear on my 1gb iPod shuffle. My spouse has considerably more, and is probably approaching about half downloaded from itunes/emusic, etc., but we also have a prettylarge backlog of CDs we haven’t ripped in yet. (also LPs, but that’s a whole other project).

120.81 gig or alomost 61 days of music on an external harddrive. That’s mostly pop/rock, a bit of jazz and no classical music, to name the big three western music traditions, let alone anything really exotic.

(20.22 gig of ‘eavy metal, 6.73 electronica, 12.39 Funk, 2.31 Gothic, 3.04 gig Hip-hop, 4.81 industrial, 3.36 jazz, 15.63 Pop, 9.82 Prog Rock, 13.11 Punk/Post-punk, 24.17 Rock, 1.59 Ska/2-tone. if you need to know)

1GB, but I listen to either a music service like Yahoo! Music (soon to be gone * sniff *) or radio or * gasp * might just put an actual CD in my stereo. In the car, I listen to radio stations.

about 110 Gb. None of it illegal, that I know of. Most from the marital album and CD collection

4455 ‘items’, 15.1 days, 50.56 GB on an external HD, or so iTunes tells me.
Most of that is music, with quite a few downloaded poetry, philosophy, In Our Time etc podcasts. I’ve recently had a bit of a clear out, though. None of my stuff is illegal as far as I know…most of it is from CDs. Some from iTunes.
I listened to Pandora all the time until they disabled UK ip addresses…sniff…disaster.

Tosca, yes, in a San Francisco Opera live performance, all the Mozart operas, too, but not that much instrumental Mozart. Much of what I have (some on a desktop, some on my laptop, some on an external drive, so I can’t easily come up with a count) is bootlegs of operas. I also have the 1976 Bayreuth Ring (with both versions of Götterdämmerung — different Brünhildes), for example. It’s amazing how much impact mp3s have had on the trading of bootlegs.

301 gigs.

None, but I think my wife keeps some of her iTunes crap on my hd. And all my CDs are ancient and have skips.

218.11 gigs.

I have several TB’s of FLAC files, a majority live shows and then many of my CD’s ripped to flac for easy playability. I also have stacks of Vinyl and DATs so I’m more than a little outside the mainstream of music consumption.

I have no music at all on my computer. When I want to listen to something, I usually put a CD on the CD player or turn on the radio (to classical or jazz stations, mostly). Also, off-topic but I can’t resist saying this, it would be nice if all the sound-from-the-ceiling systems were ripped out of commercial establishments: relatively little of this canned “music” is music, and a fairly high percentage of it is annoying, imo.

Around 18,200 songs consuming 117.3GB of disk space.

My question, and this really ought to have its own thread, is: How many of you actually enjoy listening to mp3s or compressed music in general? I use an ipod to listen to my music more than anything else, but sometimes find myself resenting the sound quality. I wonder if there will ever be enough demand to raise the standard bit rate (or develop a high quality, low bit rate file) to something approaching cd quality. I hope so.

It’s pretty obvious from the above that most of you are “people that collect music” rather “people who actually listen to music”. If you got 235389459845000000000 hours worth of music on your computer (or in other mediums) it’s pretty clear you’re pretty much downloading everything that any fool tells you should download rather you know, actually, stuff that’s worth listening to. Which is far and in between.

It works like this (a friend told me): you hear something by chance, you like it, you find out what it is, you download ‘best of’, and then, depending on how much you like that, you may or may not download all the rest of it.

None. I’m my own Walkman. Whenever I start to get an earworm I summon Schubert’s Quartettsatz or Schumann’s Toccata, a quick and pleasant earwash.

I’ve got a few hundred CD’s, and I actually continue to buy more, and I never got rid of my LP’s. I even have a new Sony turntable. How else could – or should – I listen to Richard Thompson’s “Strict Tempo”?

Perhaps it’s not entirely beside the point that I’ve got some nice big old bass reflex speakers in the living room, 15″ woofers, comfy chairs, middle-aged ears …

Why would an adult be measuring music as a number of songs, though? Unless it’s crippled it shouldn’t need words to move you.

Uses of the PC differ, Scott: I’m closing in on a half terabyte but it’s all wavs ripped from my CDs, so much less total time than folks above. I agree that compressed music sounds like crap, and hard drive space is so cheap that it’s not even worthwhile fooling with lossless codecs. About half is Indian stuff including multi-CD recordings of Carnatic concerts that have become available in recent years; the PC is great for that ’cause you can make playlists plus not worry about disk deterioration. I use Foobar 2000 0.8.3 to play; it can be set up to bypass most of the ways Windows screws up sound, and it has a wonderfully geeky subculture.

An interesting related investigation is, if you have it, to check out iTunes’ most played songs function. Mine came up with a few surprises – Nina Simone and a random Zappa tune were pretty high up there, but I don’t remember listening to them that obsessively.

How many of you actually enjoy listening to mp3s or compressed music in general?

I don’t notice much if any difference between an mp3, a proper record or cd, nor between high end and cheap ass stereos, unless it gets really bad. Mp3s are a godsend to me, as they’re small enough to be usuable and still good enough for me to listen to. I love having a huge collection of music to listen to, something to fit my current mood; there’s so much good stuff out there and unlike books or movies you do have a decent chance of listening to a good percentage of it in your lifetime.

Anybody who has to have a special system set up just right to be able to listen to their music is not somebody who’s actually into music, but somebody who fetishes his consumerist cravings. Pop songs were made to be heard over crappy transistor radios, classical music is written for concert halls, so you’re fooling yourself if you spent serious money to improve your “listening quality”.

(Just thought I’d balance out Notsneaky and other snobs here)

I don’t notice much if any difference between an mp3, a proper record or cd, nor between high end and cheap ass stereos, unless it gets really bad.

“Unless it gets really bad” is pretty much the point and that line is variable. If you’re a close listener you get irritated by more and if you’re forgiving you get irritated by less. My hat is off to you: you have a better time listening to music than I do.

about 5g, mostly ripped from LP, cassette tape and CDs. The older cassettes were actually improved by the transition to MP3, since I was able to muck with the sounds using the Goldwave editor..
most of those are old South African pop music that isn’t available anywhere, so it was cassettes or nothing. The mixtapes also got duplicated onto CD, so I can now listen to the hiss and pop of the original LP on CD in the car. Yay.

Another 3-4g of audio books from the library, put onto MP3 for the kids’ players on long plane trips, but this fluctuates wildly depending on travel plans. I don’t keep these around, as a way of honoring at least the intention of library borrowing.

I don’t have time to look for new music, so not much downloaded.

How many of you actually enjoy listening to mp3s or compressed music in general?

I can only listen to mp3’s if they are high quality, but this depends quite a lot on the complexity of the music, the dynamic range, the context you’ll listen in. Blasting some pop song while you do dishes is a bit more forgiving than listening to a favourite string quartet.

On a related note, a musician friend of mine asked about the best way to transition his collection at least partially to digital. He’s got about 6-8,000 LP’s and 45s, and another 5,000 CD’s (much easier). Any ideas the best way to do this reasonably inexpensively?

Blasting some pop song while you do dishes is a bit more forgiving than listening to a favourite string quartet.

One of the funny things about mp3s is that distorted guitars sound really shitty when compressed. The most bone-headed heavy-metal song stands to lose a good deal more than a piano solo at low sample rates.

I want to know how many backup there are out there, especially online [mozy-esque]. Apple sells an iTune, lets say “Trust Us (Take 9)”. Apple sells the D/L which is served/stored redundantly for our convenience, which we then duplicate one or more times for our convenience and protection.

How many copies do we need and what is the cost of making, having, and keeping them?

Fortunately I listen to a lot of electronica, trip hop, lounge, downtempo, singer/songwriter stuff and as far as classical goes, I prefer to listen to sonatas and the like at home, so the compression doesn’t make that much of a difference (though I’d recommend a 192 rate) and a pair of mid-range headphones will do.

But for jazz, orchestral music and heavier pop and rock stuff a good home theatre system can make a world of difference – so if you’re into that, you need one and should stick to CDs.

I LIKE the crackles on the records

There’s something about those that are exciting, probably from childhood conditioning in my case. Hear the crackle, anticipate something exciting.

On the other hand, digital noise lets you know you have the inferior version of something.

55 GB on the main box, on an external drive scavenged from my old PC. Another 10 GB on the iBook – both collections partly overlap. I listen to it all – for the iBook, I have a semi-random smart playlist that ensures I get to listen to new records at least as often as I have listened to the oldest material on it.

A small percentage fell off the back of a truck and some is downloaded through iTunes (where I avoid stuff that isn’t iTunes Plus); most comes from my CD collection or those of my friends.

Compression is rarely a real issue for me with the stuff that has a permanent place on my computers. I’m just glad I got rid of all my cassettes.

It’s pretty obvious from the above that most of you are “people that collect music” rather “people who actually listen to music”. If you got 235389459845000000000 hours worth of music on your computer (or in other mediums) it’s pretty clear you’re pretty much downloading everything that any fool tells you should download rather you know, actually, stuff that’s worth listening to. Which is far and in between.

You are kidding yourself if you think there is less than 300gigs of listenable music in the world.

Watson @ 72: the question of conversion is a thorny one. There are services that will do it for you, but typically these aren’t cheap. For example http://www.lptocd.com/ is $25 per LP.

The simple way is to get a USB turntable. There are several makes, all of which are adequate but certainly not audiophile standard. Just plug it in to a USB port, set up the recording software (usually Audacity) and off you go.

The hard way, to get better sound:
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/1

I like the Goldwave sound editor for cleaning up the digital music after recording,
http://www.goldwave.com/