holds the phone

With the talk of music streaming/ownership, spotify, bandcamp, etc...

How big is everyone's music libraries? I recently moved my entire collection from an old hard drive to a SATA SSD and just went past 400GB with over 80% of my library being FLAC from ripped CDs, Bandcamp downloads, qobuz purchases, OTOTOY purchases, piracy, etc.

The total size might be a little bigger than what the data shows because I also keep high res jpgs of all my album art (usually a minimum if 1000x1000, but I'll go as high as 5000x5000 if available.)

(Also gentle reminder to keep backups of you libraries!!!)

Oh that's fantastic, I didn't know foobar could give me the percentages! Almost wall-to-wall MP3's in here, biggest chunk of which is definitely video game music. (Including another batch of original sound data which I have yet to go through and convert specific games into a more listenable form.)

I'm realizing I started stashing MP3s originally via a PC with a 4GB hard drive. FOUR GB! Some of these files likely ended up on zip disks at one point just to conserve space. Probably why I never prioritized lossless early on. Never was able to distinguish a difference in quality most of the time, at least on any poor speaker setup I ever had.

I remember one interaction chatting with another user on Napster, asking why they had the Final Fantasy stuff at 48kbps. They said it saved a ton of space and was still listenable. Lmao, those poor stuffy sounding files... I have updated those items to higher quality since then.

Small memory bubbling to the surface today. It was within the first few days of my trying out Napster, was downloading some Final Fantasy orchestral tracks and chatting with the user sharing them. They were all encoded at 32kbps or thereabouts, so really poor audio quality with a muffled, tin-can symphony sound. I remember asking why and they said it saves a whole bunch of file space and "still sounds really good". Small anecdote about conservation when every MB mattered, but it gives me pause to consider how such simple interactions had an outsized impact at the time and how those low-quality files were what I associated with those musical pieces for years.