There’s no such thing as too much music

by
This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on July 19, 2004). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

My one major accomplishment of the weekend was finally completing a project that I’ve had going on for months now: importing every CD I own into iTunes. Quite a task, when after years of being a complete music junkie (compounded by a few years of DJing), I’ve built up a CD collection of 1,142 albums!

Now that I’m done, though, the final tally…

  • Total songs in my iTunes library: 14,622
  • Total time: 49.6 days (49 days, 15 hours, 8 minutes, 23 seconds)
  • Total space: 65.09 GB

The fact that all that music takes up only 65 GB was a pleasant surprise. When I was using my G3 as my primary computer, I picked up an 80GB drive specifically to hold all my music. At that point, though, encoding my music as 160kbps VBR MP3 files, I couldn’t fit all of my music on that drive! This time, though, I’ve been encoding at 128kbps AAC (not archival quality, but slightly better sound quality than the 160kbps .mp3s even at smaller file sizes), and managed to get all of my music on the ‘puter in 15 GB less space than before.

Then, since iTunes has a special “Grouping” field that can be used for whatever sort of customized sorting options the user wants, I set up four groups for my music. I’ve always prided myself on the fact that the majority of my music is music that I actually own, and I’ve generally only resorted to downloading songs from peer to peer networks such as Napster or the like when I was trying to get really rare tracks that I couldn’t find any other way. I was curious as to just how the numbers worked out, though, so here’s my four groups, and their final results…

  • Copied from friends or downloaded from P2P networks (technically illegal): 610 (4.172%)
  • Original rips (my own mixes, GarageBand creations, or imports from vinyl): 51 (0.349%)
  • Bought from the iTunes Music Store (legally owned, though without the physical CD): 232 (1.587%)
  • Ripped from CDs that I own: 13,729 (93.893%)

Overall, I really don’t think that that’s too bad of a ratio.

And yes. I’m a complete and total music whore. :)

iTunes: “Come What May” by Kidman, Nicole/McGregor, Ewan from the album Moulin Rouge (2001, 4:48).