Music Banter - Should I purge my collection?

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Definitely purge it. What I do is get an album, check it out, if I like a couple songs I'll save it for maybe a month. If I don't enjoy it all that much, I get rid of it. I think discographies are a sort of waste, but that's probably because I've never liked one artist enough to have every one of their albums. I don't see that happening either.

Quote:

Originally Posted by gunnels (Post 965840)

Besides, I like scrolling over my music folder and observing the growing number of items held within it (for purely egotistical reasons.)

Yes!!! :thumb:

I'm the same. I love when people ask if they can see my iPod. I'm like, "hell yes you can! You'd better enjoy it too!"

Haha, when people come in here they go
"You really have a lot of records, and I love your tapedeck, it's like the one in Pulp Fiction".
It's not the same, but that doesn't matter ;).

http://i114.photobucket.com/albums/n...o/IMG_1473.jpg

For me it's more about variety than size. That's probably why I have so many artists and such a small collection. I can count the amount of artists I have more than one album from on one hand. Though I was born with six fingers. Don't laugh. I have hand image issues.

Quote:

Originally Posted by RVCA (Post 965976)

:-o

See? Works every time :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by CanwllCorfe (Post 965977)

For me it's more about variety than size. That's probably why I have so many artists and such a small collection.

Same here. Check the link beneath my postings :)
Prettie varied, eh?

Wow cool, thanks for the replies.

I think one of my biggest problems right now is my compulsive need to collect discographies. It explains why my collection has grown so much in the last year. I used to keep my collection down to 30gb so I could fit the whole thing on my iPod, but when I realized that was silly, I sort of lost control of the whole thing.

Someone mentioned ambient. I went on a big ambient kick a few months ago, and have quite a lot of it. But I'm not often in the mood to listen to it, so I don't know it very well.

I suppose the best thing to do will be to leave it alone and just spend more time listening. Maybe I need a new rule says I have to listen to and rate five albums for every one I download!

Of course, I'm moving in 6 weeks and will be losing my amazing-ultra-fast-astonishingly-cheap internet connection, so another part of me is saying I should grab a few hundred more gigs before I go, just to be on the safe side :D

Quote:

Originally Posted by noise (Post 965609)

I think I have too much music.

My collection isn't as big as some, but it's sizable. I have 2021 albums, singles and eps that have been tagged and put into foobar, along with a few gigs still sitting my download folder.

The problem is I haven't listened to half of it. No, more than that, I haven't listened to most of it.

An example: I have the complete studio and live discography of the Grateful Dead, along with the complete ****'s Picks. I haven't touched it since I downloaded it. I like the Grateful Dead, I just haven't gotten around to listening to it.

I feel alienated from my collection. I listen to 10% of it 90% of the time. But I have a music-grabbing compulsion, and always feel there's something better out there that I have not yet heard, so I just keep getting more and more.

Just now, I put my library on random, and pushed play. A track came up from a group called Ancient Astronauts. I don't remember the name, I don't remember downloading it, but I have their entire discography. It was some really good instrumental hip hop that I could groove to. I played a bit more, and liked what I heard. But ten minutes ago, it might as well not have even existed, because I had no idea it was even there.

What to do? Should I force myself to stop download and listen to the lot? Should I trim it down to the stuff I know I like, and just assume there's nothing else out there?

Drive space is not an issue, so keeping it is totally OK. But I just don't think I'll ever get a solid grasp on what I have...

If you read this whole thing, bravo. Hope you can offer some insight :D

I'd say just limit yourself on downloading for the next few weeks.

Instead of feeling obligated to arbitrarily listen to albums in succession, try putting your library on shuffle and listen until something grabs you. Listen to that album it's from and bingo. Sometimes things don't grab you until you've experienced more musicially, that's always been the case with me - sometimes I just don't hear the right song to get me into a band, or maybe just haven't grown to appreciate their sound just yet. But if you "discover" music you've already downloaded by putting it all on shuffle, I'd say in time you'll feel much closer to what you have.

just my 2 cents.

Maybe it's just the hoarder in me saying this, but I wouldn't purge any music unless you need the space. Keeping only what you think you'd want to listen to (or could feasibly listen to given time constraints) would be fine, if not for the fact that your preferences change over time, and you often can't judge some releases until you've heard them several times IMO. And maybe I'm just weird but I sometimes like to take an album I think I'll dislike and listen to and evaluate it.

Having said that, I do understand your desire to downsize your collection to eliminate the niggling feeling that half of it is foreign to you.

Quote:

Originally Posted by RVCA (Post 965650)

I just keep a playlist called "listen to this ****"; anything I download and don't plan to listen to right away, I drag into that playlist. Every month or so, I sort it by playcount and remove everything I've listened to.

I never thought of doing that before but t sounds like a really good idea. I feel like I constantly have the problem of wanting to listen to some album I downloaded recently but not being able to remember the name of the artist.