A post from Ryan Singer of 37signals about how to take control of a massive iTunes library got me thinking about my own music collection. Obviously I’m not using iTunes, but according to Rhythmbox my music collection isn’t small. Right now it claims I have 2,884 songs taking up 14.3GB of space which would provide me with 7 days, 19 hours and 14 minutes of non-stop, non-repetitive (barring duplicates) music. I’m sure there are lots of people who can (and will) boast of larger music collections, but as far as I’m concerned that’s a lot of music. This, coupled with the fact that my Top Rated and Recently Played automatic playlists encompass only a fraction of my collection inspires me to do something about it.
Initially I was going to follow Ryan’s approach – archive off all the music and only add it back into my collection when I had a real desire to listen to it – but after mulling the idea over for a few days I’ve decided to take an additional step: instead of simply rebuilding my collection from, er, my collection, I’m going to actively seek out new music.
My collection is wide and varied, but I do tend to listen to the same stuff over and over again. Now I’m going to enlist the likes of , Last.fm, Jamendo, and Magnatune to discover something new. I’m also going to try and tune into a few more musical podcasts like Podrunner and Groovelectric to add some variety.
Any suggestions of artists/bands or podcasts for me?
Peven Everett - album "Power Soul"
Chaka Khan - album "Funk This"
Well, I’d recommend looking over JWZ’s mixtape archive for odd/nice musical mixes, Good influence.
http://cerebrum.dnalounge.com/mixtapes/
Usually announced on :
http://jwz.livejournal.com/
Other than that, Warren Ellis keeps a collection of the 4:am and regularly links to other music collections:
http://www.warrenellis.com/
If you like some electronic music, maybe you’d like MzW!!, spanish producer.
<a href="http://www.last.fm/music/MzW%21%21">MzW!! on last.fm</a>
He goes from simple electronic, experimental, break beat and dnb.
Check out blogger, there are lots of music blogs that talk about almost every genre you can imagine. Find one or ten that interest you and add them to your RSS feed. Many of them also post the albums they review.
Depends on what you’re into, but two of my top artists/bands at the moment are Ray LaMontagne and Air Traffic.
I have no idea what your musical tastes are like, but possibly check out some stuff on the ropeadope label. All CDs are less than $10, and they have an online store that sells mp3s.
ok, I’ll bite, mines bigger than yours…
20614 songs, 64 days 5 hours 19 minutes, 120.7 gb
At that size unfortunately I’ve not found any of Linux’s players really up to the task of good music management, rhythmbox took several hours and many crashes to index it all and still balks every now and then. The best tool I’ve found for managing my library is still running a copy of MusicMonkey in an xp vm… shame really.
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