I have been working on a giant music project partly for myself and partly for a good friend of mine. There have been countless hours getting correct album art and lyrics and ordering things correctly.

Saturday afternoon I thought that it was all gone. When I went to open my library to listen to some music, it would have the little progress bar saying checking library, then the correct menu bar on top would show up but the window of the application would never come up. All of the options in the actual menus were grayed out and I had no choice but to start a new library and try and import the library data that i could. It brought in some of the play lists, but none of the ratings or play counts and since I have a whole bunch of smart lists dependent on those things I still feel like I lost a lot. The last thing that you want to have to see on your screen if you have a decent music and video library is a screen that looks like this.
The good news is that I do have all of the data back and in the case of my giant project, it is forcing me to go back and fix some mistakes and make everything a bit more comprehensive and consistent. Just as a reminder to you all there is a backup option for your library in iTunes and there is also a way to export your library data which is what I should have done on a more regular basis. So bittersweet. I have all my stuff but not all the data.

I thought that I would throw up a little video showing what I am listening to. I could post it in a boring old list spreadsheet style with hundreds of links to the song, album and artists but what fun would that be. See if you can recall the band based on the album art.

Recently I posted about how much I like the Raconteurs new album Consolers of the Lonely. Nice little post. In an off the cuff sort of way I said:

Ok so I am not as huge a fan of music as my good friend Mark Artrip but I do have a bigger iTunes music library…not that I’m keeping track.

Now I did not necessarily mean for that to start a “mine is bigger than yours contest” because I thought that it would just be accepted at face value by whomever chose to read my blog. I now realize that Mark does take music much more seriously than I do and so he commented:

wait a minute, I would like to know how big your itunes library is? and if it is bigger than mine, I would like to know how much of that music you obtained legally. I like to think that I have one of the biggest legal libraries around….all terrible christian music from back in the day….but still:)

Now I will say to start off with that a blog on the internet popular or not is probably not the best place for anyone to quantify or justify the status of what is contained in their collection of media no matter what the format. What I will say is that I have never counted a library that way because honestly, I have moved my music around so much to so many different computers and in different formats that I am not sure anyone could really tell what is from where other than what I have bought from the iTMS itself. So for just the sake of defining legality lets say that only songs purchased from iTunes count since if you believe the record labels importing off of your own cds breaks copyright since it constitutes a change in format and is thus illegal. In that arguement I have 156 songs which take up 562.7MB of space and would take 9.5 hours to listen to. Not that much. Here are screengrabs of my overall library.

A lot of this actually has been ripped off of CDs or DVDs that I owned (and since got rid of because CDs take up space) at one time. Most of the stuff that I got in college has been long since deleted as my overall storage capacity expanded or contracted. I will say that changing from a desktop to a laptop prompted me to unload a huge amount of content both in the tv shows area and in music. Things like the entire audio books for the LOTR trilogy added a ridiculous number of tracks and play time to the stats. I have also been getting rid of a lot of albums that quite frankly I will never listen to again and am not even sure where they came from. 

As a wrap up to this post about music and libraries let me include a link to an amazing post that I read this morning on this very subject. Below is one of my favorite quotes from it but you can read the whole thing here if you want.

Because of the availability of music online, a very strict social hierarchy has been created within white culture whereby someone with a large MP3 collection is considered “normal,” a large CD collection is considered to be “better,” and a person with a large vinyl collection is recognized as “elite.”