The portable mp3 collection: completionist or practical?
 

So you've digitized 237 albums, properly tagged every file, and you're about to upload them all to your ipod/nomad/karma. Do you upload everything for the sake of completeness or do you listen to all 3700 tracks and abridge the albums by deleting the crap?

I am more of a completionist myself.

all of it unless i run out of room

All of it until I run out of room, then I start to purge some that I won't listen to.

The phrasing of the thread title seems to lean towards "practical." As for me, I think that it entirely depends on the album. If I were ripping The Avalanches' Since I Left You or Boredoms' Vision Creation Newsun you better believe that I won't leave out a single track. Were I to rip Jay-Z or Sonic Youth, then I would pick and choose.

all of it!

Used to be all of it, until I ran out of room. Now, I delete crap off of old albums when uploading a new album in it's entirety. Crazy, my first MP3 player about 5 years ago was just 16mb. Who would have thought 20gb wouldn't be enough...

Edit the albums. There's no point in putting songs on the MP3 player you'll never listen to.

It's interesting you should ask this question. I'm thinking about getting an mp3 player myself and was wondering just how much music of mine I would put on it. But with 40+ gigs of music, I imagine I'll just have to put on the stuff I'm sure I'll listen too. Ideally I would like to have it all on there, but money is also a factor in buying an mp3 player.

I mainly listen to MP3's in the car or on mycomputer. If they're on the computer, no problem.
In the car, I use an MP3CD player, and I have a binder with 40+ CDR's full.
So I'm a completionist, I'm actually surprised the hard-drive ones got as popular as they did [at least at the beginning, what's the point of a 16 mb mp3 player? 5, 10 GB, I can see that.]
I use to put 'similar' music on a CD [all heavy metal, all softer stuff, etc.] but I've started to vary it a bit [except for single-artist disks].

Do I really need all of those hip-hop skits, intros, and outros? No.

When it comes to my mp3 player, I'm somewhat of a completist. I have some stuff on there that I will probably not listen to. I've got about 3 gigs to go (out of 20), so when space becomes critical I'll cut out the fat.

To me, MP3 means mix. If I'm putting a CD into MP3 format for a hard drive or MP3 disc it's going to pretty much be the songs that really do it for me.

I keep them all together on my computer, but I definitely pick and choose for the portable.

Man, I haven't downloaded a single song for any purpose other than sampling a new band since 1997. It's complete albums or nothing for me. Of course I'm weird... I rarely even skip the songs I don't like when playing a CD.

I leave all of them and use Playlists for my favorites.

When I run out of room in my 40 gig ipod I guess I'll have to be more selective... or upgrade to the 60 gig model that they'll hopefully have out by then :D

I stay practical. I have playlists of everything I would want to listen to at that time. But sometimes I want to shuffle through my entire collection. So if I have every song from every album I'll end up listening to a lot of stuff that I don't want to listen to.