When a particularly large set of songs are added, I'll whip out my custom-scripted USB PS2 controller to speed up the process. When the smoke clears, I might keep 20 or so songs from the original several hundred.
I've kept 192 songs thus far in 2011, 210 from 2010, 203 from 2009, 386 from 2008 (I was in college, plus a great year for music), 115 from 2007, and 252 from 2006. Due to a rather unfortunate data loss (and subsequent backup recovery failure), I do not have year-by-year breakdowns from 2001 - when iTunes 1.0 released - through 2005, but said time period accounts for the remaining 695 songs.
During the past decade, I've listened to well over 900GB of music (~180,000 songs); 400GB from an internship working on portable MP3 players with full access to u$oft's now-defunct "Plays-for-sure" server, 150GB from 'theoctagon', 50GB here, 30GB there, etc. It's a daunting task, but I can easily knock out 1000 songs in a couple hours, keeping between 15 and 45, depending on how good the library owner's tastes are.
At this point I have a script that automatically prevents importing any song I've previously deleted; it's hacky and not ready for prime time, but it works as described and saves a ton of time since most people listen to similar veins of music.
Man we've come a long way! I remember encoding a single song with an early, terrible codec such that it fit on 4 floppies (before 'MP3' *gasp*). As you might have guessed, you had to change the floppy three times during the song. My computer at the time only had 8 bit output and a frequency response of 40-12KHz, but man it was awesome! I remember when Mac OS 8 came out and had - wait for it - a 100MB 320x240 music video of the Barenaked Ladies' "The Old Apartment"... I remember watching it in 256 colors, then upgrading the VRAM from 512KB to 1MB - enabling 32,768 colors - HOLY SHIT! For reference, YouTube was over a decade out.
Back to 2011:
I'm highly selective of what tunes get to stay in my library. At least once a year I review every single song. I finished the 2011 review last night. In all, I deleted over 1100 songs, leaving a select 2055 gems to peruse. Logically, songs from 2006 have withstood 5 reviews and thus have either awesome staying power or strong sentimental value, whereas a song added in 2011 is less likely to make the pending 2012 cut.
Plenty of people have libraries spilling with thousands upon thousands of songs, but most of that music is shit, or uncategorized, or duplicate, etc. I just press play and rock out to any of the 6.6 days of quality music! Aside: A great hidden feature in iTunes is the "skip count" index, which indicates the number of times a song has been skipped... gold for finding music you don't actually like.
Plenty of people have libraries spilling with thousands upon thousands of songs, but most of that music is shit, or uncategorized, or duplicate, etc. I just press play and rock out to any of the 6.6 days of quality music! Aside: A great hidden feature in iTunes is the "skip count" index, which indicates the number of times a song has been skipped... gold for finding music you don't actually like.
After finishing the review, I decided to start upgrading my library to lossless quality music. MP3 audio files are highly compressed and take advantage of numerous psychoacoustic deficiencies in human hearing. In short, the music you hear from MP3s in no way resembles the native audio signal, but casual ears are easily fooled. On cheap sound systems, it's often hard to tell the difference, but when you're constantly surrounded by high end audio equipment - Etymotic ER-4Ps, AKG 701s, Sennheiser 650s, Headroom Amps, Carver AL-IIIs, Carver tube amplifiers driving Magnepan 3.6 planars, etc - you begin to notice the difference.
Unlike MP3, Lossless audio exactly reproduces the original audio stream with 100% bit accuracy, typically at less than half of the native file size. I prefer the Apple Lossless codec, but since most audio out there is available in FLAC, I usually end up converting using X Lossless.
Long story short, I wasn't feeling great today, so I stayed home and sourced a ton of Lossless audio. At the moment, 729 lossless songs consume 21.21GB of space (30MB/song on average), while 1326 lossy songs consume only 9GB (7MB/song on average). I'm not upgrading every song; just the audiophile stuff.
If I converted my entire library to a lossy codec, I could keep a mirror on my phone, but sacrificing quality isn't worth it to me. Granted, on the iPhone, quality isn't a huge issue, but since Apple doesn't provide a convenient method of converting songs to lossy formats when syncing to the iPhone, I'll live with that sacrifice to keep the quality high when playing back from my computer through a USB Headroom Amp. I could keep two copies of each song, but that wouldn't be ideal.
If I converted my entire library to a lossy codec, I could keep a mirror on my phone, but sacrificing quality isn't worth it to me. Granted, on the iPhone, quality isn't a huge issue, but since Apple doesn't provide a convenient method of converting songs to lossy formats when syncing to the iPhone, I'll live with that sacrifice to keep the quality high when playing back from my computer through a USB Headroom Amp. I could keep two copies of each song, but that wouldn't be ideal.
