Asymmetrical Information

I stopped feeling the emptiness when I reached about 4,000 songs. My desire for new music will never end though.

" So how far am I from achieving my goal of musical nirvana? "

Very far indeed. To achieve Nirvana, one needs less, not more. Only when your IPOD has no music on it can you experience music in its perfection.

...but if you go the otherway make sure you have a good dose of old 'Stones, Irish folk music and early Russsian romantics.

Go ahead, Megan, download as much as your little heart desires. We'll be talking to you later.

Signed,
RIAA

I only recently achieved a level that seems comfortable - I would guess it was around the 5000 song mark. I now have 7896 songs on my iPod, and more (not so great stuff) available on a back-up hard-drive.

It is subjective, of course, and odd things can change your view of your library. For example, a good radio station started up here a couple years ago (89.3 The Current, a Minnesota Public Radio music station), and it seemed like every time I turned it on it was playing something new, interesting, and worth $9.99 on iTunes (yes, I still pay for music).

Certainly, though, I no longer feel my iPod is a barren wasteland, and I am certain I never will again.

I'm afraid I'm one of those morons who pays for it. I don't download on the grounds that I wouldn't want anyone stealing my IP.

But that's also the honourable thing to do! After all, most people might, I think, take the view tht it's not so kosher to swan into a book shop and help yourself to whatever one felt like without being expected to pay for it...

Chances are that *all of them* will be easily and cheaply accessible in the not too distant future. At that point, unless you enjoy archiving as a hobby, you won't have to "download" any of them.

On second thought, it's a function of your storage capacity, your age, how long you intend to live, how many minutes per day you listen to music, how many new songs you'll acumulate per year adjusted by how many songs you decide to not listen to each year. The amount you keep in storage should be some residual.

"I've got about 1100 songs, which is fine, but not enough for me ... how many is enough?"

I mainly listed to classical music. We don't do "songs," unless you mean Lieder. Don't you young whippersappers listen to real music any more?

Listen to enough Mahler and you'll never feel empty and yearning again. Listen to too much R. Strauss, and you might convince yourself that you're a god.

All of them sounds about right.

I have about 85G. ~4500 songs. My iPod has 990 songs, and it definitely isn't enough. Granted a small chunk of my collection is crap I bought in highschool that wasn't good enough to be stolen during college (like ICP).

I'd go for a nice round number like 100G. Should not hard to do using lossless format.

I started feeling like I had enough when I had to upgrade my 40gb mp3 player with a 60gb drive.

I have my entire CD collection stored on my computer (including classical), and it works out to about 2200 tracks. Add another 300 tracks of miscellania and my entire music collection works out to about 2500 tracks total. If suppose if I had an unlimited amount of money to go spend at Amazon today, I could maybe add another 1500 tracks to that before growing bored with the idea.

Sure, there's even more music out there that I've heard at some point and maybe kinda liked, but I really don't understand the mentality of keeping 80GB of music on hand at all times. Way too much of that is stuff you'll only listen to once, and adding it to your collection only amounts to hoarding (except that wiser heirs of your fortune won't find anything in the hoard that can be reinvested).

Although I greatly favor industry efforts to circumvent online piracy by actually exploring the market mechanism (as opposed to past efforts of mere 'whine and sue'), I sometimes wonder if the convenience, low per-unit cost, and instant gratification of $0.99/track downloads doesn't have a similar psychological function as smoking.

I was going to suggest Rhapsody (or Yahoo, or napster). It's $10 a month, $15 if you want portability, and it has pretty much everything. Only problem is that it's not compatible with Apple products like the iPod. For me, that was a(nother) reason not to buy Apple, but it seems you've already made that mistake.

More needed certainly since, as you're lass enough to acknowledge, there's a shocking absence of bagpipe music on your iPod...

I pay for everything, too. I'm approaching 7,000 songs on my ipod, and it feels like enough. (The inn will always have vacancies, though, I agree.) I think two (somewhat obvious) keys to fending off the empty feelings are: 1) A variety of genres. Once I got the ipod, I made sure to bulk up my classical and jazz collections a bit. 2) Stockpile a lot of one-off songs in addition to the catalogs. I have hundreds of songs by REM and the Beatles and Paul Simon on there, but I also have "Mo Money, Mo Problems" by Notorious B.I.G., "No One is to Blame" by Howard Jones, and "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler. Those and others like them help me feel like there will always be something for any mood, no matter how depraved or misguided that mood might be.

I currently work with a corpus of about 6500 songs. I could probably go as low as 3500, but there are times when I want to listen to an artist for a few hours, and it helps to have all of their songs on hand.

$.99 is hardly low cost, especially considering that you're receiving a low quality product. At a 128 bit rate, you're really buying about 1/8th of a song for a dollar. You should save your money to buy a nice set of headphones or speakers (and bose is not a decent set, it's the top of the bottom).

Just to be contrary, maybe you are already getting close. I have 1500 on my Ipod, and while I am certain that there are many more songs I'd enjoy if I had them, I feel like I reached enough at about 1200 songs. I listen to about 2 hours of music a day, 30-40 songs, meaning 1200 songs lasts over a month. I've had my Ipod for 5+ years, so some of the songs I've probably listened to 50+ times...but that's okay, I really like the songs after all.

Of course my musical tastes are decidedly plebian. Not a lot of deep cuts, mostly mainstream rock with some musicals, classical, and Weird Al. I figured I'd speak up because everytime I see a thread like this the comments are filled with people who value musical variety much more than I do. I'm quite certain that if I had 3000 songs on my Ipod I'd be pressing fast forward a lot to get to the good stuff.

How many songs is enough? There's a good Bob Dylan song that will answer your question.

Make a playlist for each activity (traveling, working, exercise, etc.) that you like listening to music while doing. If the playlist isn't long enough to give a new song for the entire time, you need more music. Even if you have filled up all the playlists, you will need to rotate in new music every few months.

So how much is enough? Just let your activities and playlist size to match those activities decide!

Jane, the point is not 'do I have enough', the point is 'am I satisfied with what I have'. Accept that you have a collection. The 1100 songs is what you have.

Now instead of thinking about what is lacking, only thing of what you want to add.

The feeling of 'something important is still missing; what could it be' will go away when you stop looking. And you stop looking because *you choose to*, not because you found anything. Choose to be satisfied, choose to build on to what you now have, and choose to consider your current collection a foundation or a good start.

Blessed be.

I'm afraid I'm one of those morons who pays for it. I don't download on the grounds that I wouldn't want anyone stealing my IP.

Create a loophole. It's really easy. All art and information should be free and accessible to everyone; thus, any commoditization/gate-keeping of art or information must be countered by an equivalent act of appropriation.

If that's too hard to swallow, just steal music because you enjoy doing it, like I do.

And check out Gang of Four's Entertainment! album if you're looking for a jolt of anarchistic energy to start your stealing spree.

I don't download on the grounds that I wouldn't want anyone stealing my IP.

Who are you, Immanuel Kant?

"Listen to enough Mahler and you'll never feel empty and yearning again."

Isn't that the exact opposite of the conventional wisdom about Mahler? He's supposed to destroy convention and the mundane and leave you needing something more.

Wow, you folks aren't even on the map. I have over 25,000 songs and, though I am satisfied with my collection, for the most part, looking back into history, there is always new music coming out and once in awhile, some of it is really interesting and worth listening to.

I feel similar to Tracy, though I'm about 10,000 songs off at 15,600.

If you're interested, I was inspired by this to write up a full blog post of my own here: http://blog.frivolousmotion.com/2007/03/how-much-music-is-enough.html

Good question, though, for which there are many answers. Another question worth considering: How much is TOO much?

My list is currently at 1504, and I tend to download one or two ones a week as I think of them(or learn the names of them), plus a bunch whenever I discover a band. Generally, I'm pretty content with it though - 109 hours of music, plus some other stuff I don't keep on my list, is plenty.

Jadagul: Some of us find that ownership has value. Hell, I still buy actual CDs. (Plus that way there are no quality issues, as I can encode at whatever level of quality I like; I find that MPEG1 layer 3 at 192Kb/sec is more than adequate for my needs.)

Not being able to play time-bombed music doesn't sound like a killer disadvantage to me.

Back on topic, I'm pretty well satisfied with 2800 or so songs on my 20G iPod; when I eventually get a 60 or 80G the gains will mostly be marginal - while I've had to cut out things I might listen to, I've got all my favourites on it now.

(And yes, o impostor RIAA, with something over a thousand CDs, you don't have any need or desire to quarrel with me.)

A couple of weeks ago, I put out the question: "What's the most embarrassing song you've ever downloaded (legally or otherwise)?"

http://www.chimeraobscura.com/mm/shame-and-scandal-in-the-family/

30,000 tracks and counting (admittedly, about 100 of them are my wife's French lessons from a CD-set, but hey). . .

I have a bit more than 1700 on my work computer and that's not even in the ball park of "enough." My home computer has something over 20,000 pieces of music (songs, complete bootleg concerts in individual files, whatever), and that isn't enough either. At least weekly, I find myself either buying a song on iTunes, downloading something from eMusic, or ripping a new CD because I suddenly realized that I was missing something.

My music buying habit is almost as financially ruinous as my reading habit.

In fact, while I'm sure that there is some point where "enough" is "enough", I can't really conceive of reaching that moment--there is just too much variety in the world and I want to sample all of it.

And every month there's more--more Soulsavers, more Wovenhand, more Twilight Singers. Just like I'll never read all of the books that I want to read, I can't imagine that I'll ever catch up to the list of CDs that I feel compelled to hear.

Speaking of which, now I really want to hear the Soulsavers version of "Kingdoms of Rain"...

Well, I still listen to compact disks and the radio. From what I know of signal processing, 128 kilobits/sec is not as good as my CD's, even 256 kilobits/sec wouldn't be enough. I guess since most people seem to listen to tunes on earbuds that's good enough. I'm still using those big transducers called "speakers", though, so...gee, I realllllly can't answer Jane's question so far.

I know, I'll quote the unofficial motto of rec.guns: "Buy 'em all!"

Hope this helps...

Tracy and Kevin, I just want to clarify (not that you care) that when I said 7,000 "feels like enough," I just meant that in regards to the question. I would feel comfortable taking, say, a long road trip with that much music to choose from, feeling like I didn't have any large blind spots. But yes, there's always more -- I look forward to hitting the 25,000 mark.

JMW - I hear you loud and clear. Believe me, back when I had only about 100 CDs, that sure "felt like enough" for me. I think, above all, what's important is living in, and loving the collection you have. To appreciate the enormous amount of great music that is put out there by hard-working artists is definitely the goal, and everyone has their particular listening patterns that dictate what feels complete to them. Personally, I like jumping around. I like crazy. I like hearing The Fratellis after hearing a Fugue.

Also, your point is also the reason I carry only an 8GB iPod Nano - for almost all circumstances I will come across in my travels, the 1700 or so that fit on there are plenty.

For me, "enough" is where I can go a week of eight to twelve hours of listening per day, without getting so sick any particular artist, song, or genre that I end out hitting the FFW button repeatedly just to escape them. It's about both quantity and balance -- I made the mistake of putting my church's entire set of hymns on my MP3 player; with only one GB that meant about one third of my songs were hymns. I loved it for the first three days, but by the end of the week I had to remove about 75% of those hymns and replace them with stuff off of Broadway, TV themes, folk music, bubblegum pop, and of course, Disney tunes. Before I had my MP3 player, I had an MP3-capable portable CD player, and anything short of 10 different CDs (one of which contained only an audio recording of the King James Version of the Bible) would drive me crazy by the end of a given workweek. That's about 2500 songs (or many hundreds of hours of talking.) At that point, I wouldn't feel the need to burn new CDs with MP3s on them -- I expect that if I had a 5+GB MP3 player, I'd be in a similar position. Bearing in mind that I get a ton of mileage out of the Bible, which takes up almost no space and takes hours and hours and hours to get through.

This may also be why, except for podcasts and lectures and very occasional "song" additions (like when my friend went solo and put new music on her MySpace page,) my music collection has been largely static for the last six years. I can always think of songs I want to have, but it's no longer a matter of going crazy with the lack of variety or depth in my current collection. I'm no longer entranced by every third song on the radio, desperately trying to remember names and titles till I get to a stoplight and can write them down for future purchase.

The answer is infinity. As a 44 year old who has 1,000+ CDs and had 600 lps and 300 cassettes, one can never have enough music. There is always quality music that is being released which can then be played and associated with a particular time, place, person or other memory. Even now, I dropped $350 for songs at the iTunes store last year (plus purchased 20+ other discs, although I resolved to not purchase entire discs any more) and am on pace for $500 this year. The more one hears, the more one expands her taste which leads to new groups and newer tastes. It should be a never ending spiral of consumption and acquisition . I can not imagine living in a world with a static music collection. When we stop listening to new music, we might as well die.

Well, I still listen to compact disks and the radio. From what I know of signal processing, 128 kilobits/sec is not as good as my CD's, even 256 kilobits/sec wouldn't be enough. I guess since most people seem to listen to tunes on earbuds that's good enough. I'm still using those big transducers called "speakers", though, so...gee, I realllllly can't answer Jane's question so far.

"As good as a CD" is raw 44.1kHz-sampled data spewed out at 1024kb per second. With a good compression algorithm it is quite possible to shave down the data by at least a factor of four without incuring any losses detectable by the human ear (mp3), and other algorithms can go even farther without detectable loss (e.g. wma, aac, ogg). It is also possible to do lossless compression (flac, for example).

In the end it's really about tradeoffs, including which ones make a detectable difference and the amount of processing power available at the time of decoding.

Anonymouse:
I'm not convinced that MP3 encoding artifacts are undetectable. Lossy compression can and does cause artifacts, and some people can probably hear the artifacts playing back some source music. Back when CD's were new and oversampling wasn't common, the "brick wall" filters that most CD players came with caused a whole lot of phase distortion across the frequency domain, and by golly I could hear it on some recordings. So could a lot of other people, for that matter; CD's got a reputation for being "shrill" in part because of the brick wall filters, with multiple poles required to roll off in a short frequency space. Oversampling out to 16x, which means the low pass filter can have a nice one-pole rolloff, pretty much ended that problem. But the point remains that for some source, usually classical music, some people's ears are twitchy enough to hear a lot of artifacts that others won't notice in less subtle source.

In the end it's really about tradeoffs, including which ones make a detectable difference and the amount of processing power available at the time of decoding.

That's true, that's very true, and there's at least 1.5 years worth of communications/signal processing theory bound up in that little sentence. Heck, one could argue the whole new JPEG standard rests on that statement...that, and "all ya gotta do is...".

Anoy-mouse, FLAC is pretty nifty stuff, thanks for pointing me to it.

"Never underestimate the badndwidth of an SUV full of harddrives..."

~300 CDs, ~300 cassette tapes, ~100 LPs; if we estimate 15 songs each (probably more on the tapes, but lets make the math easy) = 15,000 songs. And still buying. But not downloading. If you are satisfied with 1100 songs, you are missing an awful lot.

Wow -- occasionally I'll flip through the personals (I especially like to read Women Seeking Women and let my imagination run wild) and I'll see people list as one of their hobbies "listening to music". And I've always thought to myself, "What's that? That's not a hobby. Who in the world thinks that's a hobby?"

And now I know -- you guys think that's a hobby.

I figure I might have 40-50 CDs, but for the most part I only bought them to get one or two songs. In many cases I have never bothered even once to listen to the entire disc. So the notion of needing 1100 songs, or (good God) 25,000 is just astonishing to me.

For the record, I'm not necessarily suggesting any of you are Women Seeking Women, but it's cool if you are. Especially if you're good looking.

"Never underestimate the badndwidth of an SUV full of harddrives..."

But "you can't beat a station wagon full of nuns."