This much, and no more
Attila Girl, thinking she might be an “electronic glutton,” asks: “[W]hat if I have too many songs on iTunes?”
Which, of course, invites a further question: at what point does iTunes have too many songs?
My work-box install has 4200-odd, which hasn’t created any issues; Trini has about twice as many and has reported no problems; I know of people with upward of 10,000 tracks in their libraries.
In search of answers, I stumbled across this thread, which contains the following:
My client had an iMac that was accessing a PC formatted hard drive that was connected to a wireless network and when he got it up to 300GB with over 100,000 songs, it began to bog down and crash. The reason it was crashing and bogging down had nothing to do with limits of iTunes. It had everything to do with the following factors:
- Hard Drive Format.
- Wireless communication.
- Permissions.
- Corruption.
In short: Macs can talk to PC-formatted drives, but for optimum speed and security, they prefer something of their own kind, and wireless speeds are still markedly slower than what you can get with actual wire.
Still, 100,000 songs sounds like something to shoot for. I’m adding around 60 new tracks every month, so I should hit 100k right around my 190th birthday, at which time you should be able to fit an iMac into something the size of an early-21st-century Bluetooth headset.
fillyjonk »
15 February 2009 · 7:47 am
Would it be possible, if a person were concerned about such a thing, to buy an external hard drive, dump all the music on there, and use it as the music-storage system?
(Mental image of Computer-as-Habitrail…just keep adding on parts).
I’m one of those dinosaurs who still has CDs. I haven’t counted how many lately. But I know if I ever bought an mp3 player, I’d have to carefully choose which ones I ripped to it; I doubt they all would fit.
CGHill »
15 February 2009 · 8:05 am
Not so difficult. You could get one of those Drobo storage robots, stuff three or four drives into it, and store terabytes of material. I’ve seen old PCs salvaged for Music Server duty on a network.
I should point out that those 4200-odd songs I mentioned take up a mere 20 GB or so. (My rip of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3, with Ashkenazy and Previn, runs about 52 MB. Technically not “songs,” but you get the idea.)
unimpressed »
15 February 2009 · 9:07 am
It also depends on what bitrate you are using when you rip those songs. Personally, I think anything less than 128 bits is unacceptable (for anything other than making ringtones) and much prefer 192 bits or better.
Tatyana »
15 February 2009 · 9:33 am
Why do you need all this stuff? When do you listen to it?
I don’t have itunes, don’t have CDs or a boombox, or any of the fancy-name noise generators. I prefer quiet.
When in the mood for music, I get to pandora radio and listen to their offer. For free.
McGehee »
15 February 2009 · 8:42 pm
I have a little over 600 tracks in all on my 8GB flash drive, which leaves plenty of room for other stuff to be taken back and forth from desktop to netbook. That’s only about 80 more than I can fit on my MP3 player, but that MP3 player limit is probably most of why I don’t have more racks in all.
Anyway, even the 600-plus, if set on shuffle, eventually seems like I’m listening to a radio station with a 75-song playlist — even if it goes through hundreds before repeating any one track, the fact I can remember having heard it relatively recently makes it seem like it’s being over-rotated.
I’d like very much to be able to load thousands of tunes on my MP3 player — or however many it would take to avoid that “short playlist” feeling.
CGHill »
15 February 2009 · 8:54 pm
My Sony Walkman MP3 player (4 GB) holds, at the moment, 770 songs; the same dangers of over-rotation apply.
I’m thinking an ideal traveling collection would be about 10,000 to 15,000 songs. (I took none with me to Texas, which meant I spent a lot of time with the random afflictions of NPR and/or Limbaugh, the two most ubiquitous radio phenomena in the Lone Star State.)
McGehee »
16 February 2009 · 10:32 am
That wouldn’t be a problem for me, I guess — though sooner or later I will almost certainly replace the current radio in my truck with one that will receive AM signals even after I buckle my seatbelt or step on the brake for the first time. (I’m still fascinated and perplexed by that phenomenon.)
unimpressed »
16 February 2009 · 11:59 am
Does Gwendolyn have a front-accessible USB port on the sound system? If so, get a half-dozen large flash drives and rotate through them. If you get the same track density as McGehee, that’d give you around 3600 tunes to pull from. Is it possible to put a USB hub in there and draw from four or so drives simultaneously? If so, that would allow your playlist to be around 2400. I don’t have any car stereos with a USB port so I can’t test this notion.
unimpressed »
16 February 2009 · 12:06 pm
Oh, I’m WAY off.
Four 8G drives would allow you something in the neighborhood of 9000 songs and if the hub notion works, that would almost give you your target playlist size.
CGHill »
16 February 2009 · 12:19 pm
They weren’t putting USB ports into auto audio when Gwendolyn was hatched, at least not at the factory level, and it would be fiendishly complicated (but probably not impossible) to do a workaround.
Of course, if I ever have to replace this Bose head unit, all bets are off. :)