[iTunes] Upper limit to contents of iTunes?

[Dale Shera]

On Jul 6, 2008, at 1:43 PM, John Linthicum wrote:

> On Jul 6, 2008, at 1:22 PM, Dale Shera wrote:
>
>> On Jul 6, 2008, at 9:25 AM, Kirk McElhearn wrote:
>>
>>> I know someone who has about 240,000 tracks in his library...
>>
>> Wow! I thought I had a ridiculous amount of tracks with 24,000. (It  
>> took me almost a year to get everything ripped.) That's ten times  
>> the amount of tracks that I have! I'll bet it took that person ages  
>> to rip all of that stuff...
>
> Quite an assumption that they ripped it all.

On the contrary, it's quite an assumption that they wouldn't rip the  
vast majority of it.

> Perhaps it was all purchased legally through the various legal  
> outlets for digital music.

HA! You have to be kidding! Nobody in his/her right mind would even  
consider acquiring almost a quarter of a million tracks by downloading  
it all for "convenience" sake. That person would have to have a LOT  
more money than sense to even begin to acquire that much stuff through  
downloads, legal or not. It boggles my mind to even think about how  
much time/bandwidth/money would be spent on putting a collection that  
large together while downloading it all from the internet.

Do a little math on that. If a person downloaded 100 songs every  
single day, it would take them over six and half years to get to  
240,000. Assuming that an album has 15 tracks on it, that's 16,000  
albums worth of material to download. 16,000 albums is, roughly,  
$160,000.00 of iTunes downloads. If you ask me, there isn't that much  
worthy material out there. But, I digress...

> I've been ripping my entire CD collection for years, and I'm only a  
> fraction of the way through it. I used to be a DJ, so I've got quite  
> a library. I've got 62k songs

Then, you see my point. There's no way you'd even try to amass a  
collection that size by downloading it all, unless your billfold is a  
mile thick and your internet pipe is huge! (If that's the case, can I  
be your new best friend?) ;-)

I'll bet a bunch of your stuff is promos, cut-outs, and bargain bin  
stuff. (We do all have that kind of stuff, don't we?) Imagine paying  
full nickel to download all the rubbish that you have accumulated over  
the years!

> and iTunes doesn't even flinch at it.


I'm curious, how many gigs of drive space does your collection take up  
now? My collection is around 200 GB, excluding video content. I'm  
having trouble with the mental image of having to have 2 TB of storage  
just for my music library, which is what it would take if my  
collection was 10 times larger... To have to back that up twice (once  
here at home and once offsite) would be insane. I think I'd have to  
find another hobby.

Dale