How big is your... music collection

All Things Music
1

I’d love to get an idea of how big people’s digital music collections are.

I was having a chat on a topic about DAPs the other day on ‘the forum the shall not be named’ and the limits of how many tracks some devices will read - as it turned out my car sterio will only read about 1200 tracks regardless of how big the card is. A lot of people thought that was a MASSIVE number of tracks which really had me surprised, as I have about 6,000 tracks in my main collection. And generally download at least 5 new tracks at a minimum each week.

So I’m curious as to how large or small peoples music collections are, especially the die hard audio folk who spend the sort of money I dream of spending.

So… how big is yours? :wink:

1 Like
2

Alright everyone get your music-peens out and put them on the table for measuring…unzips…music folder

3 Likes
3

I have about 400-500 CDs from the Pay Real Money for Music Era (pre-2000). And then after Napster and Corporate Hostility Era, another 200-300 CDs purchased used and for no more than $5 each. Now, in the Moderately Priced Streaming Era, the answer is unclear. I can access perhaps 35,000,000 songs from several services. I try a dozen artists/albums every week or two, but only a handful of these make it to the end of the album. And only a 1/3rd of those last very long on my playlist.

4

I currently have 1400 albums.

5

I have about 1500 CD’s, about 200 of which I can access from Amazon’s cloud. More than half of my collection is classical music, and almost all of it comes from quality producers (like Linn Records) that will sound good on my headphone gear.

6

I have around 1000 CDs, 50 SACDs (most of which I just had ripped) and 50 DVD-A/50 DVD-Vs. All of these are stored on SSD or HDDs.

As a Roon Tidal user, I also have access to many additional titles/tracks.

7

Roughly 15-18 linear feet of vinyl albums and a few hundred CDs. Maybe 50 or 60 78s including some Edison diamond disc. I have an Edison Disc Console like this one for the old stuff. image
It’s presently in the attic but it works very well. When the power goes out, I’ve been known to take a flashlight to the attic and play “Meet me in Old Philly Billy, Meet me at the Fair”. Probably referring to the 1926 sesqui-centennial, and not the 1876 Centennial.

2 Likes
8

Oh my …

Well, let’s see … right around 12,000 albums on vinyl - 11,000 of which still physically reside in the UK. About 9,000 of those I have now either bought CD versions of, bought digital downloads for, or for the ~1,000 I’ve moved to the US so far, done high-resolution needle-drops of.

Then there’s another 6,000 or so CDs/digital downloads purchased on top of that, and god knows how many individual tracks on top of the albums.

ALL of this is lossless - I don’t mind streaming lossy content when I have to, but I won’t buy it outright.

So in terms of my actual “owned” library, about 18,000 albums (many of which are multi-disc) and in excess of a quarter million individual tracks. I’ll have to check the actual number …

I think right now, if I listened for 8 hours a day, every day,. and didn’t play any track more than once, it would take me 8 years to play through my entire collection now.

Though, in reality, there are many pieces that are repeated. For example, I probably have at least a couple of dozen different performances of, say, Beethoven’s 6th in different venues, with different orchestras and conductors, spread over many years … and the same would be true for many, probably even most, of my classical works.

7 Likes
9

1 Like
10

Wow… I think we have a winner!!

That is one hell of a huge collection.

11

I can’t compete with you big boys but I have around 400 cd’s and around 8000 digitally stored songs. So only a Tadpole amongst you Sharks.

-Paul-

12

My collection is a measly 7500 tracks, most of which are from CD and some of which are digital downloads, of which a tiny minority are MP3 downloads. In my defense, I went through about a 10 year period where I really didn’t collect music at all and have only recently taken up purchasing music again. I’m intentionally avoiding streaming services because 1) I’m trying to listen more mindfully and I find that the act of ripping a CD and then listening to a whole album helps with that and 2) I like supporting artists on platforms like Bandcamp which I think give them a fairer shake.

1 Like
13

I went through a period in the wild west days of the internet where I was downloading 50 album torrents a day, unfiltered, no VPN, anything I could get my hands on. It was a wild time. Because of that and my more…legal music collection habits today, I have a modest collection of around 2000 albums on Digital Lossless and 30 vinyls (Still building this).

I remember when I was a kid I always tried to flex my “music-hoarding-ability” by asking others how much music they had on their iPods, then I’d show them mine with obviously more music on it. One time I got royally beaten by a much older friend of mine. Since then, I’ve always needed to have the biggest music-peen (As DarthPool so adequately put it).

2 Likes
14

A lot of my LPs came from buying up entire collections at estate sales and so on. They went for tiny fractions of what they’d have cost either new or in a used record store. Many hadn’t been played at all. And I tossed (donated or gave away) more than I kept … mostly because there was so much repetition … I just kept the best copies of things (until it got to be too much to evaluate).

I’ve been into music since I was very young, so I’ve had forty years or so to amass said collection.

It causes problems though … especially for portable listening. I have a “travel” library, in a couple of forms, one on microSD cards for my DAP and another on a physically small external SSD to augment what I keep on a laptop, and those are a challenge to a) keep updated (more about deciding what to remove and what to replace it with) and b) just to pair the main library down to “must haves” for on the go listening.

My biggest audio-want at the moment is for a huge increase in microSD card capacity … these 400 GB and the latest, scarce, 512 GB cards just aren’t cutting it!

15

I’m exactly the same. I don’t use streaming services at all as I like to support artists (especially as most of the music I listen to is from much smaller artists), and secondly as I always want to download the music so its on my phone, computer, dap and car.

16

On wish.com you can buy chinese knock off sd cards up to 1tb for like $10. reliability might be wonky, but hey, its so cheap, might want to try it.

17

The problem with that is that there is no such thing as a 1 TB microSD card.

Regular SD cards, sure, but not for microSD.

The largest legitimate card currently available (i.e. that actually has the claimed amount of storage) is 512 GB. And even these are very hard to come by. It’s a technology issue at the moment … they can’t get the process size down far enough to put more storage in that little physical space.

All the wonky brands do is write an incorrect allocation table to the drive and it’ll show up as whatever capacity they want it to. And the OS will write to it. But once it hits the limit of actual storage (such cards are typical cheapy 8 or 32 GB cards in reality), it starts overwriting the existing content.

18

Haha yeah, that’s exactly what they’re doing. I had posted it as a joke really, but I ordered a few a while ago (Still haven’t gotten them) to play around with.

19

It’s only a matter of time until a 1 TB microSD card comes out. I just bought a new DAP, and picked up a 256gb card. I really like SanDisk stuff, so I ended up paying the brand premium. I also think there a lot of knock-offs out there, so buying from the right source adds to the cost.

20

True enough … but “a matter of time” is probably 2 years at this point.

The transition from 128 GB to 200 GB took more than a year, where previously capacities were doubling pretty much annually (sometimes faster). And then another year on top of that to get just another 56 GB. The next step was 400 GB which was, I think, almost another 18 months. Things are definitely slowing down there.