How the heck can you have so much music??!!!!

[kpax]

ok ive recently got a 60gb 5G video and right now im just trying to cram all my music into the ipod. its been 2 weeks now and ive uploaded almost all of the albums in my CD collection and all of them i bought online/had in my computer and its not even reaching 7gbs. i have over 1200 songs i thought it wa a big collection but some of you guys are saying that your 60GB isnt even enough for your collection!! how the hell can you have so much music and how long have you guys been collecting??

[camille]

i once thought that when i had my mini, now my 20GB iPod is nearly full and my music collection grows every week. i'm sure your collection will gradually increase; it takes time, money, and a whole load of CDs.

i started building a music collection since 2000 and i now have more than 200+ CDs. i never expected that.

[Code Monkey]

I've been buying/receiving CDs going back to 1988. That was some 3500 tracks when I first started ripping everything to computer, now it's over 4000 tracks.

I also thumbed my nose at the RIAA and ripped everything my friends had that I wanted.

I have no qualms about copying music I borrow from the library.

I buy from those evil Russians behind allofmp3.com.

I have an all-you-eat-subscription with Yahoo Music! (Tunebite for iTunes compatibility).

I buy an average of 1-2 CDs every month...

A few years ago I spent a summer using SoulSeek heavily and acquired quite a bit of music.

I still occasionally bittorrent stuff.

Final result is roughly 20,000 music tracks with more being added (and being removed) pretty much weekly. I've set a goal of holding the line at about 20,000, so hopefully the collection won't grow so much as become more refined over the next year since there is relatively little from old catalogs I don't already have.

[rooster]

i have 6000 or so songs and am adding to them weekly. its really not hard to get a big collection. i started buying cd's when i was 12. im 22 now and have over 400. plus my pillaging from friends and the internet. just takes some time to get alot of music.

[TheJosher]

I only have about 4,500 songs and my 30Gb is about full.

Some songs from CD, others from subscription services like Yahoo or Rhapsody, convterted to MP3 by tunebite.


Josh

[skruggie]

I started collecting cd's in 1988ish when I got my first cd player - I have around 200ish cd's in total. Also I have no qualms about using services like allofmp3.com and I have several libraries with unbelievable collections that I borrow from.

Although I don't use p2p anymore, back in the wild west days of Napster I collected quite a bit of music. Most of which I have replaced at this point with better quality stuff, b ut I still have some rarer stuff from those days that I haven't been able to find elsewhere.

I don't buy cd's so much anymore, but I have no problem ripping from my friends collections as well. I do buy the occational music off of itunes, but usually when I'm getting it for less than $.99 per track.

My current collections is 96 gigs, just over 20,000 songs.

[wolfpacker]

It isn't that hard if you have been buying CDs for nearly 20 years. Makes it even easier if you use a higher bitrate for encoding.

And then there are the live shows. I've got a handful of artists that for each I have dozens of live shows for. If I was a purists, I'd probably use Apple Lossless for that stuff (most of it was in shorten format when downloaded). But I just encode as a high bitrate AAC or MP3.

I've given up hope of having an iPod big enough for all of this anytime soon. Heck, it takes me months to get through a fully loaded 40 gig 'pod. I'm on track 4096 of 6339 right now (shuffle by album). But I did recently buy a bigger firewire hdd for my itunes.

[bdb]

Having varied tastes also makes it easy to compile a large music collection. I could probably just barely fill my 20GB with any particular type of music, but along with rock & indie I have a lot of classical, acoustic instrumental, electronic, new age, and various world genres. I have around 60GB total, but I can only carry about a third of that in my iPod.

And of course the encoding method you use dictates some disk space. I primarily use LAME standard MP3s, which will take about 50% more space than 128kbps.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, I got a lot of music from eMusic.com. At $20 for 90 songs, you can pile up music pretty cheap & fast. Plus they have songs on there that are up to 58 minutes long!

[punk_r0x]

I buy 2-3 cds on a typical week.

[Wednesday]

Just remember, kpax, it's quality, not quantity. There's no use in having 60 GB of music over 7GB of music if you only listen to 10GB or so out of the 60 regularly. That being said, as time passes you'll discover more and more music, and your collection will grow naturally.

~Wednesday~

[wicker_man]

When I first got the internet, I discovered (and still am) discovering loads of new bands that I like.

I currently have just under 21GB (almost 4000 songs) and my 20GB iPod is full. I usually have it on shuffle, so I get a great mix of music.

[Chricton]

Right now I have a little over 21,000. I have been collecting music since about 2001.

I remember when I only had about 750 songs, I thought that was big....

It seems you always think something is big until you look back on it and realize how small it actually was.

[bucolic]

I have been buying CDs since 1990 and have about 400 total in my collection. I also copy music from library CD collections and have downloaded music from Napster, Limewire, and iTunes music store. Recently I've discovered a few music blogs I like and have been getting stuff from there as well. So that gives me roughly 75GB of digital music.

[bigDee]

I have been downloading since 2002. I have 3847 songs making 20.8GB for 10.7 days. There have been plenty of times where I would just get lazy and not get any new music for a good month or two. Now I can't download any music because I need more hdd space. This 40GB hard drive on my ibook sucks. As soon as I get about a 120gb from ebay I am going to start downloading like crazy again.

[baggss]

I have well over a thousand CDs, have ripped most of my old LPs and tapes, have done music swaps (digital), regularly buy music from iTunes, E-Music.com and All Of Mp3.com, never use P2P, use NNTP/Newsgroups a LOT and collect albums (therefore I do have lots of duplicates, at last count around 6000 songs). My collection is pushing 500Gb and the banner in my sig is a bit out of date.

I've been collecting digital music (MP3s) since 1998.

I have over 2Tb of HDD space hooked up to my Mac.