How much music do you have?

[JuanMena]

I was watching a vid of a guy that bought x4 1TB SanDisk SD's and was like, trying to shove them all at once in an iPod and was talking about putting in 50K songs in them.

I stopped watching the video after 15 secs (not kidding) because I couldn't stop thinking:

Then got curious, and just remembered that recently (as in this past Saturday) I "updated" my playlist and decided to check how many files I have currently.

2178 .mp3 files... that's it... like... WHO THE FUCK HAS OVER 50K FILES?

Music nowadays is not that good!

(sidenote: Even if I add my "oldies" (30s/80s music) my "spanish oldies" (40s/80s music) my "90s spanish" and my games music it won't even add up to 4k files)

I'm asking you guys, how many .mp3 files you currently have?

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Only 50k? Rookie numbers ;O;

I have something like 75kish, give or take, as I download discographies for most artists that I like and OSTs for most games I like the soundtrack of. I definitely don't listen to all of it, and probably never could, but I like to keep an archive of anything I'm interested in for future reference. You never know when you might want it for something. I do the same for games, movies, and tv shows as well, have something along the lines of 40TBs worth of stuff backed up at the moment, and it only ever grows.

But of all that music, I only have around 4k-ish on my phone that I actually listen and cycle through for the most part.

 

[JuanMena]

I definitely don't listen to all of it, and probably never could

Exactly! This is why my playlist is too small ;o;
But actually, it's music that I enjoy so well that even in Shuffle I rarely skip a song.

But of all that music, I only have around 4k-ish on my phone that I actually listen and cycle through for the most part.

 

[Ligeia]

50k songs is not that much if you're into data hoarding.

 

[FAST6191]

200 bands/artists, 4 albums each before they go pop, 15 songs per album. Hopefully we could all see that as on the high end of reasonable assumption for a half invested music fan. Even if not and 200 bands wants upping you will also find most don't make it to 4 albums and 15 songs is equally optimistic for most.

12000 songs in that case. Now of course as nobody listens to albums any more you could probably bump that up a bit more. Though even then give or take say 20 classical works, or screw it we will say 100 (if your composer was never featured in a looney tunes effort then do they count?) and include some straight up folk classics, then nothing before 1950 is particularly in the cultural zeitgeist or if it is then it is a remix/cover*. Barring some exceptional years at various points are we really going to have more than 10 songs? Maybe 30 if it is bumped to include things forgotten after 7 years. Also some might want to include some world war 2 songs but I think the lesser years can probably absorb that in the noise.
70 years, 30 songs per year, plus say 50 for world war 2, said 100 and maybe another 100 for the folk stuff. 2300 then, barely above the noise of the previous stuff.

I would have thought 200 included some world music rather than English speaking + Eurodance + few novelty songs. Few more multiples of that might land on 50000 but not going to get too much higher.

*For the "I didn't know that was a cover" stakes



In my case it is scattered around the place so no idea how many multiples of a GDP of a large country I owe the RIAA. My walking about collection is not a thing as I can't walk with headphones on. Did put some on an old phone I found as MP3 players are not a thing any more it seems/we never reached the $10 eh if it gets stepped on but actually good quality world that was promised. Think that is 100 songs maybe, though could be more.

On the other hand if this AI lark gets a little bit better (several years ago saw something amusing where it tried to predict the rest of songs from intros, did pretty well but for those things that had weird intros. Equally if you are going to grab discographies and your interests lie less in cut throat world of pop music, and more things where one hit assures you a career if you want itmaybe also augment it with soundtracks even if you own the baseline, maybe get involved in some live versions, concept albums and whatever else, then I could see 50000 being barely getting started.

 

[rcpd]

50k songs is not that much if you're into data hoarding.

As a data hoarder, I can agree. I have a 1Tb hard drive simply for music and it’s almost full. That’s just music.

I don’t care if I love it or hate it. It’s music, music is awesome, so I’m going to save it. Rebecca Black’s “Friday” might be the worst song ever made, but I have it. As well as the 500+ remixes, 250+ remakes, and the best cover of the song ever made:

I’m mostly a metal head. Anything from Atreyu to White Snake, with some Lamb of God and In Flames tossed in for melody. But you bet your ass I have every single rap song known to man. From Blondies “Rapture” to technical rap like “Return of the Ohm” by Ohm-I, with some Bone Thugs and Tupac tossed in for flavor.

Country? Can’t stand it, but I got it. From early bluegrass like “Nine Pound Hammer” to modern country like “Heart Like a Truck” (god I despise that song!).

My point is that I hoard it all. If it came out and has any viable way to obtain it, I’m probably going to obtain it. I’ve gone as far as downloading a YouTube video, converting it to audio only, finding the part I liked in the video and cutting out, and saved it to my music folder.
I admit that I have a problem. I won’t listen to probably close to 60% of the music I have. There’s just not enough time in one persons life span. But I only hoard music, and I only do it for what I think is a pretty valid reason.

Music isn’t for me. Or you. It’s for everyone. Anyone who can hear it or feel the bass vibration in their chest. I don’t necessarily think it should be free, but I definitely think it should be more accessible than it currently is. I don’t like streaming services because you don’t own the music. You’re renting it. Digital Blockbuster Video for music, that’s all it is. And when that Blockbuster store has someone steal all the VHS copies of Titanic, nobody else gets to rent it (like how when a service lost the license to stream an artist). This is dumb. So I will actively purchase it (even digitally!) and strip every bit of known DRM from that audio file, save it, and play it whenever the heck I want however the heck I want.

Really it all started just after high school. This is going to age me. I was in a band and we made an “album”. We weren’t bad, but we weren’t that great either. Well, except for our drummer. That man was a genius on the drums and ended up being a professional drummer for a fairly well known band that had a few hits on the radio. We recorded our album on 8 track. Not long after, cassette tapes became popular and I had lost my only copy of our album on 8 track. I wanted to re-record it onto cassette. So I called up one of my old band members and asked him if he had one. Sure as hell, he did. He even had re-recorded it on cassette and offered to mail me a copy. I lost that in one of the house moves. Gone. So I called that band friend back up. By then, compact discs were all the rage. He sent me a CD with instructions how to “rip” the CD to audio files on my PC.

Been a hoarder ever since.

 

[Yoshkins]

I don't own any physical music but I do have a 128 gb sd card I've very slowly been adding music to over time. Right now I have about 45 albums and a couple singles. For some reason my file browser says 2,440 files but I don't see how that can be accurate. About 25 gigs as of now. It's a generally eclectic mix. I've got some Devo albums, a couple Stevie Wonder albums, two of Brian Eno's works, "Young American" by David Bowie, Operation Doomsday, Yellow Magic Orchestras first 3 albums, Clown Core's - Van, Pilot Red Son's - Achivement and a lot of others. Also a lot of video game music (Vib-Ribbon, Sonic CD, Jet Set Radio, Pebble Beach Golf Links (Genesis). I really envy the data hoarders itt through. I really want to get around to getting a nas put together so I store all my stuff and have some (disk level) redundancy.

*For the "I didn't know that was a cover" stakes

I've got a "How did you not know it was a cover?" I'd never heard (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction so the Devo version pretty much is the original to me. I still think it's way better than the original.

 

[Jayro]

Damn, I'm not even at half that...

Ignore the folder creation date, it's wrong. I've been collecting music since 2005, but I had to swap to a new M.2 SSD in 2020, hence the more modern date.

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

I have a decent size music collection, though it doesn't take up much space. Since the files I have are extremely small.

 

[BigOnYa]

And I thought I had a lot, but not really at all.

 

[duwen]

My music HD is 750Gb and is about half full... but if I ever get around to converting the rest of my CD's, minidisks, vinyl, and cassettes to lossless files I'm pretty sure I'll need at least another drive of a similar size.
For day to day use though; I convert everything to "V2" mp3's to put on my 32gb ZuneHD - admittedly, it's only around 10% of my entire library, but I can generally go for around 6 months before I feel the need to remove/replace things on it.

 

[RAHelllord]

A bunch of that is duplicates (mp3 from flac so I can more easily use it on retro devices if need be, as well as flac from raw midi files for compatibility purposes), but I'm also keeping a copy of my family's music on my server just because I have the space, as well as that I know I'm at least backing that stuff up regularly. Still, those duplicates shouldn't account for more than a few thousand files at best.

According to discogs I have some 74 physical releases on various media ranging from cassette, to minidisc, vinyl, to some esoteric stuff like GB carts, (almost) all ripped and preserved. The rest of my collection mostly came from friends where we just exchanged our ripped music via HDDs. I've always had quite a penchant for auditory stimulation, and loud and fast music fits that very well.

There's also a lot of music I haven't yet gotten around to buying from metal and industrial artists I'm following, but all in due time.

 

[DKAngel]

so um yeah lol about that....

 

[AncientBoi]

 

[FAST6191]

Dividing size by number of files it seems the flac is best brigade are rather underrepresented these days.

 

[MicroNut99]

About 2TB's of WAV, FLAC and MSF ISO's. (Mobile Sound Fidelity)
That's not even really scratching the surface of the entire 24-bit audio library.
SACD was really taken for granted.
MP3's are death.

 

[duwen]

About 2TB's of WAV, FLAC and MSF ISO's. (Mobile Sound Fidelity)
That's not even really scratching the surface of the entire 24-bit audio library.
SACD was really taken for granted.
MP3's are death.

Depends... I'd take listening to a good 320/v0 mp3 on a 'proper' system anyday over listening to the best lossless over bluetooth.

 

[tofino]

just started collecting actual music, 2951 files and 69.87 gb of mostly lossless audio

 

[RAHelllord]

Dividing size by number of files it seems the flac is best brigade are rather underrepresented these days.

Most of my files are from long before FLAC become common enough that it could be used almost everywhere. These days everything new I get is FLAC, and I've added FLAC versions to a lot of my favorite albums over the years, but it's going to be a while before I've got everything ripped again losslessly.

 

[MicroNut99]

Depends... I'd take listening to a good 320/v0 mp3 on a 'proper' system anyday over listening to the best lossless over bluetooth.

I guessing that you are talking about listening to music over bluetooth headphones, I really don't know.

Also what is a proper system. lol
People will listen to plastic pressed vinyl and say, that's great.
So many ways of listening to music.
Home stereos and portable systems, some use rca and other are all digital.
Headphones heavy, light, tiny... meh.

Best to start with the best source possible.
No reason to shit on the message before it even gets a chance.

CD's are WAV files and the closest we will ever get to the studio source.
All modern music players support WAV's and who cares about storage anymore.

Lossesless is a word used by those in the ancient past,
who only dreamed of using the WAV to surf those audio streams on portable systems.
And then there was 24bit SACD, the world was new and shiny again. Sadly only the audiofile understood.

But yea go ahead, chop up that source material good before transmitting it into the electronic wild winds of wonders,
where most ears can't tell the difference and nobody really gives a shit.