There's no such thing as too much music. Only not enough.

about 2k discs, a few hundred DATs, and a dozen or so crates of vinyl. and it's not nearly enough.

I still have enormous gaping holes in my collection. I've only slowed down recently because I haven't found a good way to actually *find* all my music.

As for prize ponies... I'm not sure, but it probably involves vinyl.

400-odd CDs.
60-gig of MP3s - ish. A lot of it is burnt onto CD-ROMS.
And, sadly, only a few dozen records. I need a better record player before I improve my collection.

What panoptican said. It is a sickness.

I get to the point where I have enough and than BAM! They pull me back in with something like the This Heat box set and it begins again. If they stopped making records I might eventually stop buying them but until then, I will shop till I drop.

I should make a list of all the CD's I own for everyone's delectation and get new suggestions from you diehards.

Do it.

Your mom.

If it's all the same to you, let's leave Mom out of it. All she has in the way of music is scottish bagpipes and Lionel Ritchie. I wish I was making that up.

STILL I SAY YOUR MOM.

All right! That's it! I'm gonna... uh... hold on a sec.

Hmm. Not much I can do from the other side of the country, is there?

Well, you just watch your tongue, missy thing. And that's all I have to say on that matter.

I once had a roommate with over 40,000 CDs. This was before big, cheap hard drives and indie P2P networks.

To be fair, he wrote for a number of music magazines. Many CDs were promotional or free. But many more of them were imports or collector items.

At one point I owned well over 1,000 pieces of vinyl and over 5,000. Now I have under 100 physical CDs and over 80gb of mp3s.

There's someone I met on a P2P network that had over 500gb online, available for trade, and absolutely *none* of it was RIAA owned, all indie, experimental and other. We briefly spoke of me shipping a couple of HDs to him so I could copy all of it.

Honestly, I could easily fill over 1,000 gb (1 terabyte) with high bitrate or near-lossless digital audio files and still want more. I could go to 5-6 terabytes or more. And 90-100% of it would be just be electronic, experimental, indie, esoteric, errata or archival, with none or nearly none of it coming from any RIAA subsidiary or member. Easily.

To put that in perspective: At Napster's peak the entire indexed catalog of every shared song and every shared file on the network amounted to about 4-5 terabytes.

And I would eventually listen to all of it many times over.

Sickness? I don't think so. Fucking fantastic more like.


(An aside: I literally have had erotic dreams about owning some sort of now fictional portable quantum or optical storage medium capable of storing vast, incomprehensible amounts of data. There aren't words to describe the density. Consider the sum total of all the computers connected to the internet right now, raised a few powers of ten. *shiver*)

Correction:

At one point I owned over 1,000 pieces of vinyl and over 5,000 CDs.

So, loquacious, we can all come to you for music reccomendations, then?

Oh, I forgot, prize ponys. Nothing too rare...

Well, my copy of Flying Saucer Attack's "Distance". The Mark Of Cain box set - in fact, some of my proudest possessions are obscure releases from forgotten Adelaide bands, like Mos Eisley, King Krill, Home for the Def, Flat Stanley, Other People's Children, and The Mandlebrot Set. Sonic Youth's "Hold That Tiger". My CD of the "Drummers of Burundi" - that's an amazing 30 minutes. And my (still incomplete) set of albums of excellent 60s/70s era jazz, psychedelic and surf rock from "Behind the Iron Curtain". Loq - if you can tell me where to get my hands on more of that shit I would be grateful.

My CD collection has hovered around the 8,000 for years. I've had a zero growth policy for a while, so whenever something goes into the collection, something has to come out.

About 8 years ago I brought my vinyl collection from about 3,000 albums to just over a thousand. Even if I had infinite space to keep it all, there's something refreshing about purging CDs and albums from your collection occassionally. Every now and then I regret getting rid of something (I wish I still kept the Korgis and Great Buildings albums), but not as much as I feared. During my fiercely independent music years I got rid of a lot classic rock, which I ended up rebuying on CD later.

As for prized records - the only ones prized to me are the ones with sentimental attachements. I'm not a big fan of collectibles. I'd rather have a clean sounding CD than an original first pressing vinyl, so over the years I have traded most of my prized albums to vinyl collecting friends in exchange for a CD of that album. The only valuable rarities I kept are my XTC, Buzzcocks, Ramones, and some Who records and singles for sentimental reasons.

I've got about 1200 CDs, maybe about 500 records (quite a few doubles, though), maybe 200 GB of mp3s. Not nearly enough.

I've got roughly 1500 CD's, 500 LP's, 60 45's, about 300 cassettes including dubs and mixes and a little over 14000 mp3's.

You can never have enough music.

By the way, the 30th anniversary Born To Run is fucking incredible.

*rolls down the window and lets the wind blow back his hair*

I'm about where Jimbob is and although I sorta think I listen to a lot of music, compared to you guys I'm deaf or something. Wow.

Loq, could you really listen to all that music? A terabyte? How many hours would that be? I'm just a little skeptical because when I calculated how many books I had read—and I read a lot of books—it was an order of magnitude less than I thought it was. Then I thought about the time involved in reading as many books as I had thought I had read, and got a better sense of what numbers are realistic.

If I can add something: I think that one of the most valuable things I've gained from MeCha (and to a lesser extent MeFi) is the understanding that people who listen to different music than I do are as passionate about that music as I am. loquacious is a great example of that. Our tastes are wildly divergent, and I'm sure we'd both be baffled by some of the stuff in eachother's collections, but I recognize in him the same 'I gotta hear that!' passion and sense of how different our lives would be without the music we love.

So, thanks.

Years ago I tossed out thousands of vinyl albums and went to cd's. Now I buy a CD rip it and then sell it at the second hand place. I really don't want all that stuff around. Next big drop in storage costs and I will be able to get rid of all my dvds too.

I don't know.... a few wall racks of CDs, a shelf of vinyl, and a few tapes are all that we have in the apartment. I sold a few too many CDs when I moved from Seattle to Chicago. Frankly, I should've sold more books.

I only have about 15 gigs of music at the moment, but I have a lot of stuff that isn't ripped yet (most of my classical music, most of my folk/rock stuff). I won't have 60 gigs all total though. I'm not sure why I don't have that much music... I listen to a lot of internet radio and only tend to buy the stuff I'm really attached to.

A lossless file is about 10 megabytes per minute of music, so a terabyte is about 100,000 minutes of music, or nearly 1700 hours. If you listen for 4.5 hours per day, it would take you a year to listen to all of that, with no repeats. A terabyte of compressed files would take as much as ten times longer. Assuming that you actually like to listen to a least a few tracks more than once, it's going to take awhile to listen to that much music.

I've got about 20 GBs of compressed files right now, although there's a lot of turnover.

About 1500 CDs. Not so much vinyl, since it takes up lots of space - I'm down to about 50 albums. About 250 GB of digital music, plus about 20 CDs worth of backed up digital music files.

Not so much vinyl, since it takes up lots of space

I understand the space concerns, believe me, but there is something special about listening to old music on vinyl that CD's and mp3's (love 'em though I do) can never replace. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but some music needs to be heard on a 45.

jon, that's exactly why I fought going digital for so long. (Well, that and I was flat broke for a long time.) I got my first CD player in 1998.

Going back to the original question, don't forget quality vs. quantity. If you've got 30 top-notch, play-em-to-death CDs, I think you're in a better position than someone with 30,000 CDs that they never listen to.

Wow. Awesome, all of you. Something I dig about being introduced to Metachat these past few months is that people I most directly relate to - the pop culture/music/performance geeks all have a strong attachment to tech as well.

I think hoarding music and being passionate about sound is a fantattic way to learn about dry tech stuff that up to 3 months ago for me wouldn't have even registered.

I've gone from being a theater and drama nerd to actually giving a shit about the differences btw wave file designations so I don't have "artifacts" in my DJ sets for you all. My, how the worm has turned.

Oh, and here's my list

It goes to my blog, which also has a nice audioblog shoutout to you all on the post prior to the CD list.

Enjoy!

jon, that's exactly why I fought going digital for so long.

Me too. but a lot of the direct vinyl rips maintain the snap & crackle needle-in-the-groove feel that's neccessary to the enjoyment of stuff like "Quarter To Three," and "Let The Good Times Roll."

I agree with JonMC. There are certain songs that don't even feel complete without the needlefuzz right before the song drops - Led Zeppelins' Zoso record is a perfect example.

jonmc:

but some music needs to be heard on a 45.

One of my favorite 45s is an extremely worn copy of "Dragging the Line" that has a ton of surface noise but no skips. When I finally got the song on CD it sounded wrong. I can only listen to that song with the cracks and pops and wall of surface noise. It sounds so much warmer to these ears.