i rarely have a lot of new music that i can't digest immediately, as i buy four CDs at the most at any one time

i do get about 30 albums on torrents every month from my fiancee, but i just put them as background music for work

I have a similar system to s_k, I have a Music folder and a New Tunes folder. Everything I download, or buy if I haven't heard it, goes in this folder until I'm in the mood for some new music and then I'll go through. I often skip through somewhat quickly on first listens to see if it's even worth the time to sit and listen to the whole way through, then if it's good I'll listen to it and move it to my Music folder where it gets organized. I'm going to be gone for a long time without much or any access to new music so I've been on a massive downloading spree that will continue till I leave, then I'll have a good half a year to sort through all of it and digest it.

Whenever I go on a large new music d/l spree, I keep a mental list of those albums I haven't listened to yet. Usually they stay in my downloads folder until I'm comfortable enough with my opinion on them to either delete the folder or move it over to my music folder. I don't really have a method, I kind of just get high and knock out a few similar albums a night depending on my mood. In terms of discogs, I go in chronological order, as it should be.

When I get a load of new albums I'll generally listen to them all once at first. After a few days or perhaps a week I'll return for a second listen. I feel this is good if I don't really like an album immediately on first listen. I've found that on second listen I see things in a new light, so often I'll prefer then(an example for me would be Tarkus by ELP). Or it could easily just reinforce my initial feelings that the album is crap, but I try not to buy too many albums I don't think I'll like in the first place anyway.

Step 1: Download 19 albums from 8 different categories I've previously designated.

• 3 albums recommended by last.fm
• 3 new releases from the current year
• 3 albums from my list of recommendations by others
• 2 albums by artists I already listen to
• 2 albums from the previous year
• 2 albums from before I was born
• 2 foreign albums
• 2 albums from a specific genre

Step 2: Over the course of about 1 week, listen to all but three of these albums (leaving a pool of 3 to procrastinate listening to if I'm not so excited for them).

Step 3: Rank each album on a scale of 1-5 where 1 is an album I never want to hear again, and 5 is an album I want to hear immediately and repeatedly.

Step 4: Add albums from tiers 4 and 5 to an amazon wishlist, and purchase whatever is cheapest every week.

Step 5: ...

Step 6: Profit!

that and.........BREATHE=)

Holy crap. You have this down to a science.

I would just go through them one by one at once. They will then be there to listen to for whenever then, especially the ones I like more.

Sometimes I just tank my way through each album, dedicate an entire day to it, like if I'm working on one of my miniature models or something, however lately I've found my best method is to just load every album I've grabbed in a Winamp playlist, set it to shuffle and go through the music like that. I keep a mental note on the artist, song, genre, etc. and if I find myself disliking more than three songs, I'll go into the playlist and delete the songs from the playlist and then the album from my New music folder. The only problem with this method is that I sometimes lose the flow of the music, but if it's something I enjoy then I'll go back and listen to the album normally.