Does anyone else find they have this problem? I think I collect more than I actually listen to. I have a ton of stuff I haven't played yet (same with dvds) It takes me a few listens to really "comprehend" something as well so things I have played once usually don't stick with me so well. Does anyone else with massive collections feel overwhelmed sometimes?

You are not alone, I have about 500 or so cd that are on a dvd/cd rack and about 30 to 40 that i have order in the last six months are sitting on my floor. That I have yet to listen to and another 18 cd that I just order from movie mars website. I buy more than I listen to. I have to accept I like to collect more than I listen.

I'm worse with novels and boxed DVD sets but do have maybe a dozen or two completely unlistened to CDs.

Yep! I've probably got some that are a few years old. Sometimes I put them on the shelf and forget about them until I happen across it still wrapped!

Reminds me of what my Dad used to say when I brought home bags of albums from the record store. When are you gonna have time to listen to that crap? Go do your homework!

I get to work, open up Zune (you can figure out why by where I work ;-), let it play all day in the background with shuffle on and surprise myself at all the stuff in my collection.

I get the majority of my music listening in the car or at work (usually background shuffle). My home system sounds great but I'm usually busy with other activities. Music becomes background rather than foreground. I love jazz and classical, but I find I'm listening those as a complement to some other activity, usually reading.

I was actually thinking about starting a thread similar to this. I blame the Internet, and all it's brought, either through mp3 availability or online shopping. It's paralysis of analysis.

Back in the day, I would drive an hour and a half every month or two to an import music store and pick up the new Ultravox 12" single, or to see if there was a new Gary Numan album out. Since there wasn't any other way to get a hold of these things, or even learn about them, each find was a treasure that got played over and over and over. Now, you can just go to the artist's website, download from iTunes, get 50 different remixes from various places, pre-order the albums from Amazon.uk, etc. I can end up with a dozen albums in my possession after only an hour's work on the Internet. Then what? It sits there until I get to it...which may never happen (though that small group of core artists always get special attention).

The funny part is that back then, we longed for the day when we'd have instant access. Now that we do, we realize how meaningful the scarcity was.

this is so absolutely true

Yep.I can remember in the pre internet days,waiting for the new album by your favorite artist(s)was so much harder,since,you had little way of knowing when something new was coming out.
I still remember back in 1990,walking in to the local Camelot Music and just about having an orgasm when I saw that there was a new Killing Joke album out(Extremeties......).

At the same time, though, I think it makes the cream really rise to the top. When I find myself listening to an album over and over, I know that it's really something special, because in general no one album gets a ton of plays from me due to how much music I accumulate.

Yes. Too much out there for me to listen to everything. Discovering new bands every day.

1.5GB of music on my hard drive and growing....

The Amazon MP3 Deal of the Day has ruined me.So many times I listen to the samples, like it, and hit BUY without even considering it, then forget about it for six months until it comes up in iTunes and I wonder, "What is this? When did I buy it?"

1.5GB? That wouldn't even fill an iPod Nano.

LOL! OOPs you're right. I meant 1.5 TERRA.

Okay, that's a significant amount. FLACs I'm assuming? Possibly 24-bit Vinyl FLACs?

Whoah, Camelot Music! I only went there a short time but remember finding a lot of deals. The place I really hung out was Tower and probably paid full price most of the time, except for their exciting January clearance sale, which had a few bucks off everything!

One of my problems is when I get new stuff. I'll leave it in a prominent place for a while, then get ambitious and sort it with the many many other CDs in my collection and then it's out of sight, out of mind. My ipod has made it easier, especially for listening on the bus, but there are capacity issues there as well.

No. All wav files. OCD purist is my lame excuse Pun intended.

The ipod has drastically changed how I listen, and collect, music. Pre-ipod, I would buy the album, and it would stay in my car player for months. I would routinely search through my collection of CDs for a certain album, because it was easy to remember what I had, and where it was. Once I got the ipod, and started finding cheap ways to get new music, it quickly became an issue of listening to something once, and then moving on. It was cool hearing something new all the time, but I didn't really dive deep into something very often.

Over the past few months, I've done a lot of paring down of my library. If I got it free somewhere, and I don't really care if I have it, I deleted it. I've also limited myself to a music budget each month, in order to try to digest what I am purchasing. I also have started shuffling my library by album, instead of song or genre, to get a better idea of an album.

One more thing I've done, is started an "album of the day". This is just a few playlists where I grab a single, complete album, and listen to it in it's entirety, maybe even a few times. Once I tire of it, I replace it with a new album. It's been fun to go back through my collection, revisiting albums I bought a decade ago.

The sheer volume of recorded music out there is definitely overwhelming.

I'm also at a weird stage where I don't really want to keep revisiting already-heard albums as much as finding new music to listen to. My internal logic seems to be "Why bother listening to Album X four more times when I can listen to music I haven't heard by Artists A, F, W, and Z." By actively applying this logic to my music-listening habits, I've listened to hundreds of albums in the last 12 months (I'm conservatively estimating that number to be 300-ish... but I'm sure it's more), but can only pick out a handful that were memorable.

I need a better way to "flag" albums that I remotely enjoy just so I can remind myself at a later date to give them another shot.

^ I'm the opposite. I love to find albums that are so good that I want to learn and memorize them, can sing along to them, have them become a favorite. There's a reason that radio stations play familiar tunes and not and endless stream of new songs. That would be like hell to me.

This is kind of how I am these days too. 10+ years ago, I'd just keep a binder of CDs in my car and gradually swapped things out as I bought new albums, but everything would get at least a couple of spins, usually more unless it was really a stinker. Nowadays, I have albums on my iPod that I haven't listened to at all (thanks largely to having an eMusic account for about 2 years) and I don't even bother keeping CDs in my car anymore.

In a weird way, the advent of digital music and the ease of access that came with it made music feel somehow disposable. Maybe part of it is just the sheer volume of music out there due to the fact that a band/artist can write, record, mix, and distribute a full album without ever setting foot in a professional recording studio these days. Then again, it could also be that I now have my own discretionary income and no longer have to hit my dad up for cash to go to Circuit City and buy some new CDs.

Therein lies my dilemma! I also want to find those new favourites (that really is the #1 goal for all of us, isn't it?), but how do you decide who deserves a second, third, or fourth listen? My thought over the last few years has been that any artist/album/song can become a favourite if you listen to it enough times, but that doesn't mean that they were more deserving than anyone else. So, in my endless search for new favourites, I find it hard to decide whether or not to revisit any given album because the next one on the list could be "the one!" It's a vicious cycle...

I was the same way. I always had a large binder of CDs in the car... then I transferred all my albums to MP3 CDs... then to my first ipod... and now they're all in "the cloud" with millions of other songs waiting to be heard, with new stuff being released every week.


Come to think of it, I think another part of my own problem is that there are limitless resources for people to suggest new music, and I'm the type to give everything at least one chance. Today, that means adding the music to my ever-growing Spotify queue and getting to it weeks later, when I'll forget who suggested it and why. But, in the past, I only had a handful of people suggesting new music. Hell, I heard most of my favourite bands because of ONE friend, growing up.

It's much easier now to discover new music, but it was much easier in the past to give it your full attention.

You could convert and save 30-40% of space and still be as OCD. WAV>FLAC>WAV = identical files & md5 fingerprints.