Glenn Wolsey published an interesting interview with the owner of the largest iTunes music collection. The owner of that collection, Will Friedwald, maintains a massive archive of 849 GB of music equating to 172,150 tracks. It would take roughly 2.2 years if Mr. Friedwald played each song back to back. As you’ll discover in the interview, having iTunes manage all those songs makes it rather sluggish.
I am happy to report that my 9GB of music leaves iTunes running like a champ. That 9GB equates to roughly 1,800 tracks, most of which were ripped from CDs I own, and 745 purchased from the iTunes Store. A few years ago I did have a much larger collection of music but I sat down one day and deleted songs and albums that weren’t up to my tastes anymore. How large is your music collection?
On a related note, I am eagerly awaiting the release of Bandwagon DIY. I covered the launch of Bandwagon, an OS X application that backs up your iTunes media online, back in February. Since then, the Bandwagon team discovered that they cannot handle the insane amount of storage that people need for their media collections. As such, the upcoming Bandwagon DIY and DIY+ services allow you to backup your iTunes music to your Amazon S3 account, FTP server or Omnidrive. The DIY+ version adds the ability to sync music between 2 different computers.
PaulStamatiou.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress
Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.
With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like PaulStamatiou.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before.
I used the Scribe WordPress plugin and service to optimize this blog post for SEO.
{ 56 comments… read them below or add one }
3.45 GB- but that’s everything. About 950 MB of stuff that I listen to regularly.
2.5 years worth of songs… wow. I’d like to see his play counts. Lots of 0’s or evenly spread etc.
7.37 GB
I don’t really understand the need for Bandwagon or Bandwagon DIY though. Sure backing up online is reliable, but isn’t backing up your library to DVDs just as reliable? Plus if you’re going to backup to your own online storage space, I can’t really see the justification in the extra $1/month you have to pay, even if it is that cheap.
8500 complete albums amounting to about 590 GB.
I don’t put all my music through iTunes because I was never confident of it’s performance. I tried putting about 120GB once and it choked iTunes on my ibook g4.
7,812 tracks – 49.74GB
Just 3,577 tracks @ about 8GB. I did a big clear out a little while ago, so it used to be more chunky than this.
Like I said back in February, bandwagon was a dumb idea providing a superfluous service.
http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/02/23/bandwagon-launches-online-itunes-backup/#comment-114418
We have ~ 17200 tracks, 110GB of music, almost all of it ripped from CDs we own. I have bought a few tracks (ok, 240 tracks) from the iTunes store but always end up regretting it (they won’t play on our Squeezeboxes). I might pay the same price ($.99) for a DRM free track, but certainly not more when I don’t get liner notes, a physical backup, etc.
Having once lost the entire library and my backup library to dead drives (damn you!, Maxtor), I now keep two spare copies (one at home, one at work) on more reliable drives (Samsung).
13.896 items, 40,4 days, 58,65GB
11,104 tracks, 30.05 days 58.03 GB
I have about 45GB of tunes.
I have way over one terrabyte (closwe to 1 1/2) of music in lossless formats (flac) or what I consider to be the second-best, mpc (muspepack). A collection like that chokes just about anything, especially if you tagged the hell out of it. I don’t use iTunes (sorry) and I manage everything mostly via various playlists that “chop up” my collection into manageable bits. Winamp can handle those easily … although scrolling smoothly through 70.000 tracks is certainly a no-no with WA (it also wasn’t built for nutcases like me, me thinks).
I’ve started backing up indispensable stuff to online sites because I’ve had some serious problems with Maxtor, Western Digital AND Fujitsu drives failing after a comparatively brief span of time (all those “new” budget backup 500GB and more solutions seem to have put a serious dent into product reliance and, I guess, quality control). I also don’t have enough cash right now to build myself a decent RAID array.
I’m still a CD guy though and 96% of what I have in the above formats I also own as CDs. So, the music is still there, but I’d like to preserve the insane amount of time I spent on tagging my digital fi8les these past years.
Cheers!
After reading the comment about the 1tb+ archive I have to simply chime in. I have been collecting mp3s, started in the late 90’s like every other kid, but kept collecting harddrives and the like. Started with 128kbps, moved up to 320kbps only, then through lossless formats (mainly flac), and have done nothing but collect, collect, collect. I have lost ~300gb of my archive due to stupidity (obviously too-old harddrives spinning all day) but as it stands, here’s my stats:
348708 MP3 Files – 2042gb
22144 flac Files – 645gb
Total folder count – 29384
Album art crap – 3gb
Currently about a tb of it is sitting on 2 harddrives that are simply too crappy to exist. Time to backup again.
A couple facts about a archive this big:
1. No software (amarok included) can handle it.. but believe it or not, WMP11 can handle half the archive without too much lag
2. thousands of random subnested folders of downloaded music from torrents and napster and ftp sites and directconnect and hell even modem from my friends over the years. No. It is NOT organized in ANY form.
3. I still find duplicate songs on an almost daily basis, once I found 11 copies of a single metallica song in all difference places.
4. You have so much crap that you will redownload music you already have because you forgot you downloaded it 3 months ago.
5. I use MusicBrainz Picard to do mass audio-fingerprinting of the songs that I get to rename, retag (and hopefully) automatedly get album art.
6. Genres: techno/trance/electronic/80’s/country/heavy metal/soundtracks/comedians..etc. hell everything
I suspect that I probably have one of the largest private archives in the world, so Im not stupid. 4 Years ago I started using massive TrueCrypt volumes in the case I ever get a visit.
Yep, the moment Bandwagon DIY comes out I’ll be all over it w/ some A3 syncing. My library is a little over 100GB but I’ve been ripping at 320kbps lately.
I’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 tracks, weighing in around 15 – 29 GB. Nearly every once of those is ripped from the few hundred CDs I’ve collected over the years.
I’m another one with a seprate collection of live music, kept in high-quality FLAC and SHN files. I don’t have a huge collection of those show though. It’s probably around a dozen shows at an equal number of gigs.
I don’t understand people who have less than 20…no 30gb. I mean I have cropped my library down multiple times and it now sits at 50 right now. But I’m constantly adding and taking away so it fluctuates, 50 is the lowest, up to about 100. I mean there’s so much good music that I don’t see why someone wouldn’t have less than 20. I listen to every bit of my music within about a month so I consider it keepable. Just my two cents.
1765 items, 5.7 days, 9.11GB
Volkher, I knew you were into music but 1TB+ damn! Very impressive. After a few hundred gigs I would get worried about how to store it all and keep it safe.
I’m running over 450gb in my iTunes and yes it is quite sluggish, but still usable and still way better than everything else available for me. I’m sad to read this article and realize that there is someone else that almost DOUBLES my collection of mp3s. *sigh*
Weird, I wonder how he kept going?
I hit 200 GB by 2000 and after that I lost interest in collecting MP3s.
I hope that Bandwagons first client it Will Friedwald!
That’s a ridiculous amount of music. I think that if my library ever got that big, it would be a bad thing because I would lose track of what I have and don’t have. Additionally, I think I would probably lose touch of some songs that are actually my favorites..!
My library is only ~20GB, and that’s with two seasons of the office! Every now and then I go through it to delete the stuff I don’t really listen to anymore. Whats the use of having it at that point?
I have a 30 gig music folder in my home dir. 18 of that is Music on iTunes, 9 is Podcasts on iTunes. The rest being folders outside of the iTunes directory, but often managed by it. iTunes shows 382 tracks as purchased, which I’m sure is a lie – I’m not that addicted. According to iTunes it would take me 8 days to listen to the music and 6 to listen to the podcasts.
I blogged some time back about how to regain a stack of hard disk space from iTunes thievery. I clone my machine every few days so that’s my backup. I have countless data CDs in one of those folders that is pretty much all music, since I run mainly (read only) from my laptop I couldn’t have all my music on the hard disk so I’ve got a few hundred other albums on an external disk on my desk at home but that’s not manged in iTunes so I don’t miss it to much. I would like one day to create an array containing all of the above just to see what the sum total is, but I can’t be bothered spending time doing all the CD swapping to copy it to a disk. On top of that I’ve downloaded some s*** music in my time that I wouldn’t dream of listening to now so its not bad thing that is in the back of a wardrobe somewhere.
I have about 15gb worth of raw mp3s.
Hey, Paul, I have the best backup available … everything on legally purchased, old-fashioned, haptically wonderful …. CDs. :) Yeah, I know, we collectors all have a screw loose.
I believe it’s said CDs have a lifetime of ~30 years, similar to VHS, so it’s good that you’ve got them on a hard drive somewhere.
@Sam Lu – the $1 monthly payment for Bandwagon DIY is because you actually do use their servers – it stores the metadata of iTunes.. things like play count and ratings. For some reason that isn’t being stored on your storage service of choice.
Paul, I read more about the justification of the $1 monthly charge on their blog and this service is starting to make a little more sense to me. Probably should’ve done the reading before I posed the question :P
My library weighs in at ~40gb. Still pretty snappy for over 5,000 songs. I need to revise it and cut down on the songs I don’t listen too though.
12.61GB – 1659 tracks.
you guys all put me to shame. 3238 songs, 13.81 gigs
Truth is I listen to the same songs all the time and never tire of them.
I’m approaching 15,000 songs. It took the whole year, but I listened to every single one of them with no repeating last year.
There’s just so much great music out there and I’m adding more to my library every day.
And what tunes are your top i-tunes? I own lots of vinyl (reggae, drum and bass, down tempo stuff, acid, house, techno stuff, rock, new wave, dub, electronica, experimental) of which can not be found easily on digital recordings.
I have around 1,700 – 1,800 tracks which total up to around 6GB.
They are spread out into around 50 – 60 albums, 40 of which are mixtapes.
I hate having even this much music stored on my PC… I’m afraid I will lose it (CD’s are way too volitale.)
CDs and DVDs have a much longer lifespan when they are pressed, not burned. I know I have more CD-Rs than I want to admit that were exposed to bright light and head long enough to ‘re-burn’ them..
Someone commented on the volatility of DVDs. One thing I’ve done for a living in the past is burning DVDs in bulk. Unless you’re paying for the best of the best brands, you’ll see CRC errors in a scary percentage of them once you try to copy them back to a drive, even if the burn software ‘verifies’ them correctly.
Anything that deserves to be backed up deserves to be backed up right. Skip a few new songs each month to pay to protect the ones you’ve already purchased. As far a ‘backing them up’ on the good old store-bought CDs they came on, please tell me you have homeowners insurance and a good inventory!
So I’m a backup guy. I liked it so much I bought the company… (sorta)
Kevin S. Peterson
Backup To The Web
http://www.backuptotheweb.com
Well…. I’ve been encoding (and recently RE-encoding some discs with AAC) my entire collection for almost a decade now. Here are the vitals as of 05.07.07
37,996 songs. (Mostly MP3 encoded…. about 40% is AAC.)
113:01:56:45 total time. (113 days!!?? Not nearly as impressive as Mr. Friedwald… but I’m certainly not trying to catch him! : )
Library = 172.11 GB on an external Firewire drive – (300 GB capacity)
I’m about to undertake a weekend lockdown, where I start backing the Master Library off onto DVD. I’ve already gone through 3 external hard drives now and the prospect of losing all my hundreds of hours of encoding is making me nervous…..
I subscribed to Bandwagon DIY and started backing up my 40GB of music on 29 April. I have thus far (8 May) carried out 51% of that backup using a fast DSL (18MB) connection.
I’m honestly at a loss to understand why it’s so slow. And as I intend to use it to transfer my music to my laptop, it basically means the whole process will take about a month, although it will be much quicker syncing thereafter.
owww
im about 25gb of music in my library
im about 14gb of video(mp4 4 ipod) in my itunes library :S
I’ve got ~35 GB of music. more than half my Macbook’s 60 GB harddrive. i actually just bought a Western Digital Passport, in part inspired by your review of it.
Mine’s 55,334 songs, which comes to ~260 GB
I have a good deal of low quality tracks from a lot of armature punk bands, as well as vinyl rips (if you average it, it’s about 4.6 mb per song…on a standard mp3 encode that’s generally a 4-5 minute long song…I generally have either very short music or very long music (we’re talking > 1 minute – hour long tracks…not spoken stuff although I believe I have a few spoken albums…although they’re divided into “popular music” length tracks.)
I’m sitting at around 9500 tracks which is around 42GB or so (technically I had around 130gigs of music dating back about 8-9 years, around the time of napster, but it’s all rubbish encodings, so i either deleted them or lost them in my last hd crash — curse you Maxtor). Right now I’m in the process of re-ripping everything I own to FLAC, and for the stuff I’ve purchased on itunes, well I haven’t quite decided what i’m going to do about those since they are DRM’d and I use rockbox on my 5.5g 80gig ipod; so right now DRM is a no go for playing.
I keep the master collection on a 500gb seagate drive in an icydock external enclosure. Right now I manually mirror the 42gigs of music to my ipod. I use iTunes for playing music, but not for managing. I manually manage everything between ipod and external hd.
I have 48352 songs, 131.8 days, 175.59 GB, all are complete albums except for the top 100 billboard songs from 1948 to present. I have about 3044 albums. I use SyncBack to back up my hard drive daily. It also backs up my itunes files, so when I re-install, I start inputting this file and it auto looks for my music. Itunes is sluggish, but been better since I reformated. Listen to people on here, the external drives are not reliable back up. I am on my third external in as many years, they seem to overheat and crash more often. They are ok to back up as long as soon as one crashes you get another and back up again (b/c the odds are way against internal and external crashing the same day, but the next day could happen).
i have 357 Gb of which 70Gb is music and the rest is movies and tv shows. Anyone else putting movies into iTunes? it works will with front row on a mac mini?
i have i terabyte of music
7414 Songs, 18.2 Days, 25.44 GB, All music is on cd on spindals next to pc one day i will have the biggest collection, another thing that makes me know i love my music more than all of you is my play counts range from 3-468 every song in that range comp that?!
At the moment I am at 12,098 songs, 37.2 days & 191.30GB on a dedicated 500GB Western Digital MyBook. I just finished importing all my CD’s that actually matter and am using the Apple Lossless codec.
I’m about to import roughly 1,500 hours of live stuff I have on DAT and will blast right past this so called world record holder. I see no problems so far with a large numbers in iTunes and actually anticipate losing drives. You have to. I have SuperDuper back up all changed files nightly on a secondary dedicated 640GB Western Digital MyBook short of a lightning strike I should be ok. I never want to lose my music.
83,109 tracks
609.53 gb
I have 35,262 songs which equals 220 Gigs and that not all, I haven’t got all my music into iTunes yet. I bought an external HD to run my music from so now I’m rebuilding my collection and filing so I can find everything easily.
I’ve never had any problems with performance and my collection is relatively HUGE.
I will certainly surpass the record holder eventually, I’m a music fiends and I love collecting.
So the line has been drawn in the sand, muah ah ah I’m coming for ya!
I have 5011 songs, good for 30+ GB, and 14.1 days of continuous playback. I add new music almost daily and my collection fluctuates some. I have it all backed up on two iPods and one external, which I’ve had for over a year no problems.
A good majority of my collection is in 320, some in VBR which I hate, and some low quality 128 stuff that I have to redo when I get the time. 99% has artwork.
IMO it’s not possible to have too much music. Your collection can never be complete.
If you don’t continually add to your collection and have a goal then your wrong.
I have at this very moment, precisely 15,717 songs and on a steady increase every day without fail, amounting as of now to 113.32 GB. A sizeable portion is @ 320Kbps, which is now an encoding necessity. Up until 2 years ago, I wasn’t clued in to mp3 jargon and was blissfully unaware that the possibility of encoding at 320Kbps even existed. I now take thorough precautions to ensure that possibility becomes a full fledged reality. I am one of the many unlucky audiophiles that is consciously aware of the lossy fluctuations in sound crispness whenever encoded at 160Kbps or lower. I announce myself as a self proclaimed condemner of variable bit rate wherever it may plague me. Be gone demonstrable treachery.:P Heh.
hmm i bet i could catch him if i tried… i got lets see, 202GB of music which works out to 33 000 songs.. but the thing is, ive only been downloading for like 3 months… it all started after i saw my friends itunes n he downloaded discographies n had like 8000 songs and it was so clean, i was so impressed, so i deleted my 4000 songs of random dirty messyness… n started downloading discographies of everything i like, n now im always looking for new cool bands. so yea 3 months of downloading, only about 94 days of music tho
35gb, but its all 1 genre :d (black metal) so i could have more if i dowload/own other genres like hip hop or dance but its just not my style
17,511 songs in 45 genres of 465 artists and 1217 albums. Most of them are m4a at 320 kbps, some are Apple-Lossless.
Quick update, since this post/thread has a life of its own.
I’m up to over 8 TB flac lossless, having backed up most of what I wanted to have backed up from my collection. The rest I don’t feel like ripping anymore … and there’s still a lot. Surprisingly enough, I only smoked two Plextor drives (and guzzled several gallons of fine Venezuelan rum) in the process. :)
The problem today is really finding a player that can handle a DB like that. That much music becomes too unwieldy for just about any software.
Everything is filed away into folders according to a) genre b) artist and c) year of release … the old fashioned way. I don’t like software screwing around with my tags and/or the arrangement of my music on my HDs. In that respect, foobar is the only player I trust and nothing else touches my collection.
Each TB or 1 1/2 TB drive is mirrored once, so I have two backups of each CD/file/folder … whatever.
If the house burns down, tough luck … I guess.
Cheers!
Thanks for stopping by again Volkher… I can’t imagine how long that would take! At least you’re taking care to back it all up safely.
4188 Songs, 30,65Gb. Already.
12510 songs
32.6 days
62.53GB of Straight hiphop
pm
Topics:
Posts: 1
Find User’s Topics
146,784 Songs in 320 or Apple Lossless with Cover Art
2,302.58 GB
522 days 08 hours 44 minutes and 48 seconds
8753 albums
Largest in the world, no doubt.
-D
I started properly collecting and cleaning my iTunes about a year ago, and id say its almost perfect. About 1000 songs are un-albumed or are randomly downloaded singles, but as it stands my stats are;
24282 songs, 64.5 days, 129.42 GB
Growing everyday…