Currently there are about 1,600 tunes in my iTunes catalog. Still to digitize for backup purposes and listening enjoyment are my 400+ CD collection and my 100+ vinyl records which I can't find CD's for, which would add slightly to that.

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I have mostly classical in my iTunes library. A 20 minute symphony movement counts as 1 track and 1 song. A 30 second fanfare counts as 1 track and 1 song.

A much better measure is total playing time. iTunes says I have 53:17:23:32 days:hours:minutes:seconds worth of stuff in 19495 'songs'. However, this does include audiobooks (including the Complete Sherlock Holmes) and some iTunes U downloads. There's 41:15:30:47, 15778 'songs' in my classical playlist.

About 5 years ago I started a digitization project. I'd take a dozen CDs into work each day, and would rip them to a portable hard drive and play some while ripping.

dave

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Playing time isn't good because, as you said, it includes audiobooks and podcasts.

FWIW, my library is about half classical, and I have 42K items... And some of those are non-classical and quite long: live jazz, Grateful Dead jams, and ambient music.

Playing time is 157+ days.

Kirk

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Read my blog: Kirkville -- http://www.mcelhearn.com
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I listen to classical and have another problem. Most symphonies, etc., come as separate movements for separate tracks. I rip the separate movements and then use iTunesJoin to join them into one, but keep the movements. That way, my shuffle sometimes just get individual movements and sometimes get the whole thing. But I have a bit less "songs" than "files".

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Note that you can set shuffle to "album" or "grouping", as well as "song". My classical collection plays 24x7 on album shuffle. I'd actually prefer grouping shuffle (more 'diversity') but most of the CD Database Entries don't have grouping info. Now when I add a new CD, I add the grouping info before ripping it. Eventually (when I'm totally bored :-) I'll go back and retro-fit grouping info on the existing collection.



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Pretty median list at 5,331 but growing at around 100/month. All are 256k AAC with the exception of iTunes free songs (I won't buy 128k). Average song length 4:34.

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What I did was go through my CD library and rip the songs that I knew I loved. My CD library is about 4,800 CDs; this means I missed a lot because I couldn't place precisely what was on the compilation in hand. But a lot of music -- a great deal from the 70's, for instance -- simply was no longer of interest to me. I did this long ago on a PPC Mac mini with an 80 GB drive, and have simply moved the library from machine to machine as I upgraded.

Today I have an 8-core, 8GB multi-head mac with terabytes of storage and I could do the ripping a good deal faster, not to mention without impacting anything else I was doing... maybe someday I will. But its a big job. I don't buy from the itunes store, and won't, until or unless they completely drop the DRM. As far as I'm concerned, they might as well not even be there.


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well I'm at the high end of the curve with 114,204 songs (311:21:06:16 total time, 628 gigs). and that doesn't include another 300gigs of recently ripped and/or downloaded that I can't add in to my main iTunes library because it would probably make it unusable.

That's a HUGE problem I see... iTunes is a DOG in performance if the library gets above about 50,000 tracks... I noticed a performance issue after about 25,000. I _constantly_ get 30 seconds of beachball where I can't do a thing. Often just by scrolling thru the library, but especially if I write or correct a tag, try to make a playlist or add new songs... which as I've said I've not been doing. I keep hoping Apple will release a new rewritten pro-tunes application, but doesnt seem like its in the cards. They're more concerned with adding in the kitchen sink and whirlpool bath as well. too bad they didn't just create a media manager for the store/videos and ipod stuff, not a bit of which I ever use.

(not exACTLY on topic but if anyone has a suggestion for a similar app that works great with huge libraries, I'd like to know)

obviously I am a bit obsessive about music... a couple thousand cds, tons of old vinyl (slooooowly getting digitized or found in digital form but much OOP). Been a used record buff for 30 years now! Then... i discovered... archive.org and the live music archives! wow. talk about a diskspace killer ;-) My music fills a terrabyte drive with spillover onto another HD now. Thank goodness the $/gig has got so good lately!

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I wrote about this recently on my blog and got many comments that go in the same direction:

http://www.mcelhearn.com/article.php?story=20080129103804465

At 42K items, it is very slow, especially when changing tags. I use a separate library to rip, because it works twice as fast.

And Archive.org - yea, tons of stuff I don't keep in my library. I have hundreds of Grateful Dead concerts, as well as tons of other jam band music. I have a separate library for that too.

Kirk

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Read my blog: Kirkville -- http://www.mcelhearn.com
Musings, Opinion and Miscellanea, on Macs, iPods and more

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Try pruning your smart playlists.

I have about 30,000-odd songs, and lots more audiobooks, movies and podcasts. My iTunes was running like cold molasses until I pruned my smart playlists way down, and set most of the rest *not* to do live updates.

See if doing this helps you too.

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I have no smart playlists and only 3 other playlists.... its SOOoooo slow and annoying that I don't do anything anymore with playlists. It is slow without playlists. as someone else indicated, after 30 or 40,000 tracks, the whole thing slows to a crawl.

Somewhere I read that it doesnt even matter if you have more CPU speed to throw at it, its a limitation of the XML storage method, but I dunno.... I only know that its borderline unusable at a certain point.


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Eh, beat ya. Almost 130K songs. I have a NAS that is raid-5ed that holds it all. Connected via Gigabit ethernet. Works great.

Will have to expand the NAS soon, as it is 94% full.......

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last I looked was 247,609....

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8318 items, 581 days, 55.94 GB

90% ripped from purchased CDs. 10% iTunes store. 0% pirated.

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Just started my library up two years ago, and I am at almost 2000 tracks (roughly 1000 a year). I listen to classical music, and about half is from CDs and half from downloads (legal downloads; this is classical music, check out musopen.com, classiccat.net, or even Wikipedia for hundreds of free and legal classical music downloads). I am a real tag nut, I won't listen to any track until I have entered all relevant tag information and made it conform to the rest of my library, so the music importing can be a slow process for me. It pays off when I am looking for a song, however.

I didn't count about 500 "junk" tracks, old music I don't listen to, stream files, etc.

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I'd be very interested to see a poll on the disk space used up by iTunes. I keep a modest library of under 6,000 tracks, and yet I've got almost 60GB of music. The reason is about 1,000 tracks I have in Apple Lossless, and even a CD ripped from vinyl into 24-bit/192kHz lossless (over 3MB per 5 seconds of music).

I think my hard drive cried the day I discovered OiNK.

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We may have to do a follow-up poll for all you heavy iTunes users, just to see how big some of these collections really are! :)

-rob.

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This sounds like a lot of music (and lots of possibly illegal downloading) until you take a couple things into consideration: I'm a 50 year old semi professional musician with eclectic tastes and I've not only been building my music collection since I was about 12 but I also inherited a substantial collection of jazz and big band from my uncle, who was a professional musician and a bluegrass collection from my grandfather who was a semi professional bluegrass musician. I took advantage of eMusic during the early days when a monthly subscription fee meant unlimited downloads which accounts for as much as 25% of my collection. I've ripped every CD I own and I've ripped close to 50% of my vinyl - a slow tedious process.

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2,548 songs, 1,202 in my favorites playlist (4×★+).

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I've got five thousand tracks of just accordion music! (Out of 11,000 total with the other stuff.) 15 days is enough to get me through my weekly squeezebox radio show. Any other oddball playlists out there?

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I don't know if this is unusual, but I'm guessing it is.

I have 3992 songs in total, of which almost exactly 1/3 (1327) are by the same artist, Rush. They've only recorded 161 songs on studio albums, so on average I have 8.24 versions of each song!

I don't know whether that means I should get out more, or that Rush really are unique, but I've spent 32 years actively looking for other music I can love as much, and quite clearly (from the stats), have failed dismally :(

If anyone has any music suggestions, they'd be gratefully recieved, though no-one's offered me anything close to date!

Mark

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And I thought I was bad with an average of 3.62 copies of every officially released Hawkwind track :-)

89000+ tracks here in three libraries. The product of a very very long time spent ripping my CDs and vinyl to disc. Of that lot, less than 50 are iTunes purchased tracks, which suggests my taste in music needs modernizing!

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Well I just checked and I seem to have collected about 435 CDs worth of Christmas/Holiday/Winter tunes... so there's about 6000-7000 tracks of just christmas music there (and I'm not even Christian anymore, just that it brings up such great childhood memories I guess). The weird thing is that I love it beginning in mid November and thru the holidays, but the day after xmas (Dec 26) I don't want to hear anymore....

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17967 tracks, 84 GB. Serving it throughout the house on a Rev B. TiBook 400 that's still going strong (at least for this kind of thing and quick web browsing).

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How do people get such huge collections? I have 1,841 items in my library, and have always thought that was huge! I'd have more, but there just isn't that much good music out there. Although I do have to admit I might be a bit of a music snob- while I like some of just about everything, it has to meet my standards to make it into my library. Unless the lyrics are good, it flows well, and it's performed well, it's unlikely to make it into my library (although I do admit to having a few mediocre tracks).

Or is it that people have a lot of versions of the same track? One poster here mentioned that he had something like 8 versions of each track, on average. I have made a point of NOT doing that- there are only about five tracks in my library where you will find more that one version, and about half of those are ones I purchased from the iTunes store, and after listing to the full thing found there was something I didn't like about that version that didn't show up in the 30 second preview. Either way, 50+ DAYS of music files seems insane to me :P :D

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Aluminum iMac 20" 2.4 GHz/3GB/300GB HD

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'being old' is a good start.

I have about 8500 tunes in iTunes. A large percentage of this is the CD collection I accumulated in the years between the introduction of the CD (I remember when vinyl wasn't a novelty!) and 2001 or so, when I started digitizing my stuff on my then-new dual-450 G4. I'm not sure how many CDs that was, as they all got trashed in Hurricane Katrina. Something like 3-400. And each of them was carefully picked out; I had very few CDs that I didn't actually like.

Add in stuff ripped from friends' collections, ripping a bunch from my boyfriends' CD collection when I moved in with them, the times someone says 'hey you might like this' and points me at a well-ripped album, and so on, and it's pretty easy for a collection to grow to that size. And I don't consider myself a collector or anything like that. It's just the result of about 25 years of casual, thoughtful music acquisition.

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I have 7036 songs, and at 35 GB, that's 5 GB more than the original drive was in this G4!

I don't put in stuff that I hardly listen to... so unless I need it on my iPod I can walk down the hall and look for the CD. Wish the 400+ CDs had a search feature like iTunes!

I'm surprised how many songs some people have!

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G4/Digital Audio/1GHz, 1.5 GB, Mac OS X 10.5.2 • www.david-schwab.com • www.myspace/davidschwab • www.sgd-lutherie.com

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Sorry, couldn't resist! ;D

iTunes is up to 5960 (after clearing about 200 in the last 3 days), 26.31 GB, and 15:04:03:22. If you include the music on my external HDD, not in iTunes, it's well over 9k. Good grief, how did I manage to collect all these things? I've filled up my poor (malfunctioning) iPod Vid with music and podcasts... Let's hope apple releases (at least) a 32 GB iTouch for >~$350-400 this fall - at least, that's what I'm betting will be out...

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