"Too"..much music how do you cope with it

Dear Bert,

interesting ! That is a lot of music you have.

I keep on buying music too. Sometimes I buy music that disappoints me, but I never ever delete music from my library. Diskspace is not expensive and it doesnot bother me sitting there.

what i do a lot to make life a bit easier, is using my tagging software to indicate how much I like an artist or album. That makes it easier to select something when start playing. It is a bit of extra work, but any new album that enters my librarybis first thoroughly listened to and than tagged (do I like it, genre, sound quality, a few comments etc) so I can use that tagging later on.

Cheers,

iver

Hi Bert,

    All my music is on the HDX. I play lots of favoutites and the new stuff, but i also enjoy using the HDX like a random jukebox. Using the ipad, i pull up the albums and just randomly press a letter and then quick flick the album list and see where it walls.

Suprising how often it lands on music not heard for a very long time !!

With excess of 2000 LPs there is always something to listen to. I sometimes have a small spring clean. This is usually of duplicate late pressings where I've replaced them with earlier/better copies. I don't discard albums because I don't like them as it's funny how when you go back to them at a later date they can sometimes sound better than you remember them. Luckily I have a diverse taste in music and can go where my mood takes me.

Yup, it's a problem for me too.  I really don't buy much in the way of new CDs - possibly as little as five per month, but they soon stack up.  New music really deserves three, four or five plays before passing some form of judgement - but I can't seem to get to give them that exposure.  I have 30-40 minutes each way in the car every day - I currently have the iPod on random - but I keep thinking I need to force myself to use this time in a more useful way.

Hi Iver, I like your approach. Another argument to at some time move to streaming....

I find excessively large music collections are more to do with showing off, and most of those LP/CDs will not get listened to more than once.

150-300 albums of stuff you really actually would come back to listen again is a realistic size.

Anh,

so what do you do if you have been buying music for 40+ years then?

Richard

I have a meagre collection of over 1500 albums and around 500 CDs. There must be the hell of a lot of "show offs" or hoarders in this forum.

I have about 5,000 LPs now, 1,000 7" singles, and about 4,000 CDs and 1,000 cassettes.

So I've got a lot of music. Sometimes the unlistened to pile of silver and black glowers at me and I feel awfully guilty.

Most of the time the biggest problem is space, and time. I seem to be unable to get rid of anything though, even those albums I've only listened to once or which I wonder why I ever bought.

Tried all four and streaming. Without much success, so far. Selling really isn't a serious option. I do listen to music on the road, but in terms of hours it's hardly relevant. I don't want to stop buying, either, although I've cut down to maybe 1 or 2 per month. 

That leaves cloning. Despite my best efforts, all attempts resulted in small blonde guys who seem to care more about breaking down the house than classical music.

My collection has already grown out of my allocated share of shelf space (about 16m), and partly sits in boxes or in sleeves. Not ideal, but I haven't yet had much success with getting seriously good performance from a computer.

Cheers,

EJ

I suppose that I am an anti-collector.

I have 25 day's worth of music in iTunes, which is most of the contents of some 600 or so CDs.

It is rare that I manage a month without deleting something.

There is one large addition that I would like to make - being the Cantatas of JS Bach.

Otherwise what I have been doing is refining my music library rather than growing it. I see no point in retaining any recording that has not been played for two years. I delete it and give the original CD away to someone else, or donate it to Oxfam. I currently have a pile of about twenty waiting to go there.

For those who might say that 25 days of music is rather a small amount, then I'd say that if I want something different, there is always the radio!

I notice that I have 4.2 days of JS Bach, 4 days of Beethoven, 3.8 days of Haydn and 3.6 of Mozart! I have only two recordings of Stravinski, which hang on by their toes only. No Shostakovitch, no Hindemith, no Webern, Berg or Schoenberg. It is possible that I may get one or two recordings of music from these composers this year, as I do know some of their music that I am fond of.

I have about 1 TB of hard rive space,because I reckon it does to leave plenty of space. I expect to almost half fill it with AIFFs eventually.

But sometimes I find myself deleting recordings that seem less pleasing to me than others of the same music that I also have. For some music one representative recording seems quite enough,and for other music, then several different performances seem essential.

For example I have four complete recordings of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, but currently only one complete cycle of Brahms symphonies. That is odd, because I am terribly fond of Brahms, but mostly he seems to get quite dull [if often well played]recordings. Somehow the music does mostly go better i live concerts,which is where the radio comes in!

At one time I owned about 900 LPs [hateful bloody things, LPs], and about 1000 CDs, but that is too much for me. If I ever found myself approaching that sort of number again, out would come the pruning deleter's axe once again, though I never make impulse purchases, so it is mighty unlikely now!!!

ATB from George