When I first bought a 40 GB iPod, I didn’t think I would ever fill it up. I thought I would use (quite a bit of) the excess space for either long term storage (backups for instance) or temporary storage (to transfer data from one computer to another as with a thumb-drive, or record conversations).
On 01 December 2004, I finally exceeded the iPod’s capacity! [Incidentally, although the iPod theoretically has 40 GB of space, only slightly more than 37 GB is available for music storage - the rest must have gone into applications to manage the device or have just disappeared into thin air...]
As of today, 11 December 2004, I have 7300 items in my iTunes library taking up 42.46 GB of space. Of the 7300 items, 6385 are songs/music, the rest are audio books, language courses, seasonal Christmas music (I have 334 of these) and stuff by Dave Matthews Band (urgh!). Yes - I have at least 6385 songs that to listen to. That’s at least 428 hours (or 17.8 days) of continuous music! (There are admittedly some duplicates in the library, but not of a significant magnitude. Some of the supposed duplicates are different recordings of the same song, e.g. one’s studio recording and one is in concert.)
Most of this collection was built up in the last three months, those first months of grieving after I had moved out. Some people put their minds and energy into work as a means of living with the grief, others into shopping, I dedicate my waking hours to amassing a huge music collection. It’s the only goal I have in life at the moment that is simple to understand, easy to manage and thoroughly achievable (once you know where to look).
It started off with the latest releases, then I began to slowly build up a rather huge selection of contemporary Spanish music (because, for some bizarre reason, as I discovered, the greatest number of alternative distributors of music are Spanish speaking), and now I’m slowly moving on to filling in the gaps of my music library - music from the 90s and 80s, then 70s and 60s. Heaven was finding the entire backlist of Madonna’s albums - including her very first! It’s amazing what you can find when you put your mind to it!
At the moment, I am amassing music at a rate that is faster than my ability to “consume” it. I listen to about 30 to 40 tracks a day. But I’m adding on average, probably about 100 tracks a day! This might explain why as of 11 December, there are 4622 songs that I have still not heard! And I still haven’t really gone through my existing CD libary and ripping them!
As the library has now exceeded the capacity of the iPod, I can no longer synchronise it in its entirety. I must now specify what it is I want sychronised with the iPod. This is achieved through either manually ticking every song you want to carry along with you or creating playlists and telling iTunes to sync those with the iPod. So the next step is to fiddle with and manage these playlists. That should keep me occupied and further distracted! But you’d be amazed at the sort of things iTunes users do with their playlists!
Posted on December 11th, 2004 by jl
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It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post. It’s been difficult, if not outright impossible, to do so. On the one hand, I’d like to say that there is so much going on in my life right now but in reality, there is really only one thing that has dominated my entire existence for the past few months and will continue to do so for months to come: the PhD thesis.
