Downsizing your music collection

July 2nd, 2012 by everydayminimalist

I don’t own CDs nor do I own cassettes.

What I do own, are two hard drives full of music @ 200GB worth.

That’s thousands upon thousands of songs, and hundreds of albums, for days and days of music.

Credit

I COULDN’T FIND WHAT I WANTED

It just struck me the other day as I was using iPod that I couldn’t find the ONE song I wanted to listen to*.

(*Chase and Stratus – Eastern Jam in case you were wondering).

For whatever reason, it was lost in the mix of all the names and groups and I was getting frustrated.

Then I realized that I simply don’t listen to all of it.

KEEPING SONGS JUST TO KEEP WHOLE ALBUMS

How silly is that? I only listen to maybe 2-3 songs per album, and I kept the full album nonetheless.

JUST BECAUSE I HAVE THE SPACE..

..it doesn’t mean I need to keep it. I can keep all of the music on my hard drives without a problem, but

WHY DO I NEED 100 DAYS OF SONGS?

It’s ludicrous!

I probably can’t even make it through a week of songs in a whole year, even playing one song each time.

I listen to my music about 4 hours a day either while working, relaxing or using my iPod while walking outside.

So I made a decision to downsize on my music collection to keep only the music I loved.

HOW I DOWNSIZED

These were my rules:

  1. Take only the songs you’ve replayed from each album
  2. Keep all classical music
  3. Remove duplicates (live versus CD, keep the one you like)
  4. Only keep remixes of what you like

On-going maintenance: As I listen to a song I no longer like, make a note of it, and remove it completely from my backups and my devices.

JUST BECAUSE I CAN KEEP IT DOESN’T MEAN I SHOULD!

8 hours later (spread out over 3 days) I went from 200GB to 30GB of music.

I know 30GB is still a lot of music (about 2 days worth of music, or 48 hours of continuous playing), but it is a heck of a lot easier to find music now.

It seems like I have such an unlimited amount of space to keep whatever I want, but just because I can keep it, doesn’t mean I should.

This is the same principle I use in my life, so why not apply it to digital storage as well?

Posted in Decluttering & Organizing | 17 comments

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  • http://twitter.com/HelloDMo David Morton

    I had the same overwhelming feeling when I would look at my iPod, and I found that I wasn’t even familiar with the albums that I said were my favorite, largely because the amount of time I had to listen to them was so small because my collection was so large. I’m an album listener, as opposed to a singles listener, so my solution had to be album-centric. I’m also a pack rat, so I didn’t want to get rid of much. Here was my approach to balance the best of both worlds:

    1. Create a new playlist in iTunes that contains nothing but my complete albums.
    2. Create a playlist in iTunes containing the “retired” albums. These are albums I no longer listen to, and aren’t likely to listen to again.
    3. Create a smart playlist containing everything in the first playlist, but nothing from the second playlist. These are my “active” albums.
    4. From this, create a playlist containing my 50 essential albums.
    5. Also, create another playlist with 5 more recent albums that aren’t considered “essential” albums.
    6. Only sync the “essential” albums and the recent albums to the iPhone. This gives me a good 55 albums worth of music, and limits my exposure so that I listen to things enough to truly appreciate them. It also discourages purchasing more than I want.

    As another option, I might also sync over 5 classical albums as well, but again, I want to be familiar with the music, so I will only sync over 5 as opposed to “all” of my classical albums.

    Out of a collection that has nearly 100 gigs, this limits me to essentially 10 gigs of music, which should be plenty.

  • Conner

    Here’s what I did.
    1. Get MediaMonkey
    2. Get extension “Artist Top Tracks”
    3. Run “artist top tracks” on all your music, it gives every song a ranking based on how many last.fm plays there are.
    4. Keep all the highly rated songs and your favorite tracks
    5. Give all the tracks a star rating
    6. Delete all the rest
    7. Get extension “genre finder”
    8. Run on all tracks
    9.Put tracks in “Various Metal”, “Various Folk Punk” customized compilation albums
    10. Change metadata album name to “Various folk punk” give it an album cover and wa-la

  • Guest

    What a timely article.  I grew up with a lot of music in my house and was a dj in college, so I had 5 books of CDs along with iTunes.  Yes, I was one of those folks who digitized all of their CDs and then kept the CDs!  For me going through my CDs was something I put off during my minimalist journey.  For whatever reason I got motivated in May-June of this year and was able to pair down to 1.5 CD books.  I kept only CDs where I listened to all the music and can keep in my car!  Going through my iTunes library is my next adventure.  I get so annoyed (with myself) when I scan through 10 songs asking myself “Why do I have this?!”  I have also become a devotee of Pandora.  Always with you and always a new artist to love!

  • Sebas Benz

    With encouragement from posts such as these, I’ve deleted my iTunes library and have opted for Spotify Premium. I can travel the world and have 10 songs or 1000, streaming (also downloadable) from my laptop or smartphone… for about $10/month. – Saves space, physical and digital, and saves a ton of money.

  • http://anexactinglife.wordpress.com/ anexactinglife

    I think digital storage, either on storage drives or the cloud, is fantastic for serious music lovers. If we “catalogue” everything that goes in, by ensuring correct artist, album, song and genre info, it is all accessible. It’s that initial time investment that makes the difference. I have 13,000 songs and I make a point of listening to them all every couple of years.

  • Example

    I’ve done exactly the same, maybe I’m a little extreme. 100gB to 5.84gB but I’ve kept only the songs I couldn’t live without. Any other songs are available on a myriad of streaming sites etc
     
    You also can downsize on your computational needs, i.e. I wish to go from a 128gB Macbook Air to 16gB or maybe 32gB iPad – it is cheaper to buy than my £999 Macbook Air. Coupled with iTunes Match this negates the need for external hard drives. However, I do have a USB memory stick just in case! Thank you for this article, very reassuring! 

  • Joshua Poe

    I use amazon music services – they allow unlimited storage of music with any paid plan – which start at like $5 a month.  They are accessible from anywhere and can be downloaded when you want them.  No worries about backing up either.  I really need to trim down what I have on the server though – I have about 18,000 songs right now (this includes audio books that each chapter is a song).  I find what I want by creating playlists that suit my listening needs.  It would be a perfect service if there was some way to delete duplicates other than one at a time – and a way to blanket delete anything that has not been played in over 12 or 24 months – that would keep your music collection evolving with your tastes and time.

  • http://twitter.com/A1SHM Aishah

    Eastern Jam’s an awesome song!!
    I used to have 800+ songs. Now I don’t have ANY (I can listen to music on YouTube). Great as it means I no longer have to worry about making sure it’s always backed up and whatnot ;-)

  • Ministudent

    Another good idea is to create smart playlists- some can be configured to play new music and some can play music not heard in 30 days. You’ll make great use of a large collection if you create these types of things. Also, putting music in temporary storage might be another option. I don’t like the idea of deleting music I’ve paid good money for.

    • Claudette

      I love all your ideas this comment!

  • Jo

    Downsizing my music is what I’m doing now too! A few years ago, I borrowed my friend’s ipod and transferred a lot of songs  onto my ipod in order to explore the genres.  However, I never really got to listening to all those songs.  I’m listening to those new songs every day in order to pick out what I would listen to, except it is a really long process.  I can’t wait till I finish the project with songs I will listen forever!

  • TatiLie

    Great post! I’ve checked my iTunes and got shocked with the amount of songs I’ve never listened and never will. I wonder why I kept for 12 years an album of bagpipes. 

  • Quinn

    Not quite for me, though, since I like to rediscover stuff I haven’t listened to in ages and somtimes put it on shuffle and listen to things I never got around to. Also, my tastes change pretty often so I’ve found that while I didn’t like a certain song a few years ago, I like it now. I see the appeal of this though, since so much music can be overwhelming.

  • Alea L

    Pandora  internet radio is great. If I hear an artist I like, I just create a “station,” for that artist or music genre and I get an automatic playlist of similar artists. I like it as I am a casual music lover, I like listening, but am not to fussed about the other stuff. 

    • Alea L

      also, its free, which saves A LOT of money at 99 cents per song!

    • Claudette

      I also love Spotify! They have great internet radio on Spotify. 
      Soundrop is also a great internet radio. 

  • Sweetpea

    This is great advice.  I definitely find it hard to keep my digital life uncluttered.  It might not take up physical space, but turning on my computer to be greeted by endless files I don’t need is just as frustrating as wandering through a messy house.  The temptation to save every document, video, and mp3 just because you can is strong, but then the majority of them are forgotten and lost forever in stuffed file folders.  Digital clutter should be scrutinized under the same standards as the physical; keep what is necessary, keep what you love, and toss the rest.  You’ll enjoy and actually use those files more when when you’re not distracted by 50 other outdated word documents, or humorless videos, or tasteless songs every time you go looking for one.