The downside of collecting

[DieNacht]

Does people here stop listening / buying for longer periods ? When on holidays abroad, I am able to for up to a month, since there´s a lot of other stuff to experience and organize, but having a very light and small laptop now makes such pauses less easy ...

[bigshot]

I used to feel that way until I got a Mac Mini and a Drobo and set up a media server. Now I have well over a year's worth of music organized by genre into different itunes libraries. If I feel like listening to classical music, I load up that library and hit random play. More often than not, it will select something I haven't heard before (or have forgotten). If I like it, I listen. If I don't like it, I flag it for removal from the library and move on.

I used to wonder why I would want to randomize my collection. But I've found that the randomness is liberating. It helps me sweep out the corners of music that I haven't given enough attention to, and it guarantees that My favorites don't get beaten into the ground by overexposure.

The best thing about having a database driven music server though is the ability to sort. Gracenote tagging has gotten much better since the early days of mp3s. I find that I can pretty much depend completely on automatic tagging. The sound quality of compressed audio has improved greatly too. I find that AAC 256 is indistinguishable from lossless.

I keep a laptop on the end of the couch and a binder full of CDs at hand all the time. I feed the disks to it as I feel like it and occasionally push the batch of rips across my wifi network to the server. That way, it's never a chore and there's always a lot of new music to listen to.