Well, where do I start…

I currently have about 20GB of music (about 3,500 songs) on my hard drive.  I know that’s probably not a lot to some folks, but it’s a lot to me.  I still have about 30 plus CDs that I need to rip to my PC which will ratchet that number up a few more gigs.  Of course, had I not had my entire music collection stolen in H.S.; I could only imagine how much music I’d have today.  I think I lost between 50-70 CDs at the time, including some box sets, etc, etc.  If only I hadn’t forgotten my bag in the gym during PE that day.  Then, I had some more CDs stolen from my car.  I’m not sure when or where this one happened, but another chunk of music lost.  Not as severe as the H.S. incident but probably another 10-20 discs gone.

The crappy part was I had actually purchased all that music at the time.  We weren’t talking about mix tapes/cds/etc.  Nope,  just music off the shelf that I went to the store and bought the old fashion way.  Oh well.  I can’t worry about that these days, but still, it’s something to consider.

Anyways, back to my collection…My music collection started waaaay back when, you know, the pre-napster days.  Yes, I bought cassettes and CDs and then eventually transitioned into the online download era of purchasing music.  Honestly, I don’t remember the last time I actually bought a CD.  I used iTunes for awhile cause it was the best option, but I’ve completely jumped ship to Amazon’s MP3 store and I love it.  These days, I despise iTunes with a passion for all the DRM clad music that I must sift through.

Why am I waxing about my music collection?  Oh, I don’t know, probably because I’ve been spending hours cleaning up and reorganizing the whole mess that started all those years ago.  Why do that?  Sure, I have close to 1.5TB of hard drive space at my disposal, so that isn’t the reason.  I realized this past summer that my collection was in dire need of cleaning up.  A lot of duplicates (from backups, etc), bad files, and multiple file types (wma, mp3, mp4, etc) being the main culprits.  Basically, in order to come to grips with what I have/don’t have, I needed to clean my musical “closet”.

I want to be able to easily play ALL my music anywhere in my home or outdoors without any fuss or sloppiness.  Plus, I consider myself one hell of a DJ (even at our house parties)  and I can’t stand the chaos as it is now; so wish me luck as I finish my quest.