for the last 4-5 months.. maybe even longer ive been attempting to listen to every album i have ever download or uploaded to my computer. It has literally taken me that long to get to the J section alphabetically. Over 270 gigs of music. I used to have a major problem of downloading everything i could get my hands on that was well reviewed or sounded interesting in the recommendation forum, without listening to the majority before hand. Now, realizing I could never enjoy all this music I have stopped to go through the library album by album.

I know Ill be looked down upon by downloading all this shit, but i assure you, bands that truly move me i either purchase their vinyls, shirts, concert tickets, ect.

The way ive been going through these is pretty simple. Ill listen to a random song from the album and if it interests me at all, ill keep it. If im on the line with with, ill spin another song... and you get the idea.

Do you think this is an effective way to sort though all this shit that i have? has anyone every attempted anything like this? and do you have any recommendations? I generally read album details, reviews, and whatnot while im listening to said songs. I cannot believe how long this is taking me. but along the way ive discovered ive got some really cool shit that woulda sat in my music library unnoticed had i not taken the time to sort through. Death metal in particular has grabbed my attention lately... along the likes of Bloodbath, Cannabis Corpse, and on and on.

also im doing most of my editing with the help of some inebriation, as ive noticed through the years it helps me be less critical and lets me be open to more music.
I guess im posting this just for fun. Throw me any recommendations, criticisms, listening hints, whatever comes to mind. Bash me, give me a pat on the back, whatever you feel!

I've had some similar tendencies with hoarding albums in the past. What I have come to find is that it is really hard to listen to a single album and really let it soak it in.

My advice would be delete your music or save it on an external or something and only get the cds that you can remember of the top of your head or the ones that really stuck out to you and listen to them, repeatedly. Burn them to cds and play them in your car, or whatever. It seems to me the more of a selection of new records I have the less time I spend on each of them, listening to only a few tracks or whatever.

I know its totally a lame problem to have "too much new metal cds, I can't listen to them all" but I've been there and in this digital age, when so much good shit is available it's hard to really enjoy some pieces as much as they deserve to be enjoyed.

But to your original post, yes listening to the albums and deleting the shit you don't like would probably work, just take a lot longer.

Usually when I listen to some heavy shit when I'm fucked up, I just love everything so I would say there is some bias there. I'm usually fucked up most of the time tho so.

I used to have a 40Gb mp3 player and found out I much prefer having only 8Gb. It forces me to take out a smaller collection of albums which means I have to give artists a better chance.

If I have to be out of town for a few days, I will often only select albums I barely know or don't know at all, so I have to really give them a spin and determine whether it's worthy or not instead of falling back on my well-known classics and favorites.

I do think in this day and age, a lot of people listen summarily to a shitload of music but really, they don't absorb much, if anything. You have to put some efforts in order to truly appreciate art.

We as a society have digressed to the point where even when we have so much access we don't focus on individual things too much. I can listen to something a few times and remember what it sounds like a year later but most people aren't like that. It's all about instant gratification and having quantity over quality. I was trying to explain this to my girlfriend but I couldn't think of the word. She can listen to a single song all day long and prefers individual songs/singles as opposed to full albums which I am the opposite. I can't just have a single song by a band I need the whole album.

Unfortunately this leads to me downloading and keeping things I might not really like. Let's take Obscura by Gorguts as an example. Earthly Love is my favorite song and the first 5-7 songs are awesome but I really don't like the other songs yet I keep them on my phone for some messed up reason thinking I will sometime listen to them when I know for a fact I won't. Why do I keep it? Because I like having full albums.

To the OP, maybe just delete stuff that doesn't sound good and work fromt he stuff that looks good? With that much music that is what I would do.

The problem for me, is that I almost always get a weekly itch of like, "man, I really want to listen to X album by Y band." Because of only taking out a quarter of my collection, I don't have X album and I don't even have Y band. This became a problem and for me, it turned into just slimming down my entire collection to make everything fit. I ended up just cutting a lot of baggage that I won't miss.

I can't even begin to comprehend the amount of work it takes to swim through all that stuff, even more so if you just downloaded stuff on random.
I buy all my music, and I still can't keep trace of all the albums or give them a decent amount of swings.
In 2012 I bought 230 items and at least half of them are still waiting for a really focused listening.
So if you download all your stuff, I'd suggest you then take the effort of listening the full album. Hate it - ditch it, like it - keep it but do listen from cover to cover. It might take a while but it's worth it.

A good way to alleviate hoarding pains is to actually listen to stuff right after you download it, instead of stowing it away for in case you want to listen to it in the future. That leads to an overwhelming amount of material to listen to, and it makes you feel like your library is filled with a volume of things that may or may not belong there. Follow these tips and you too can have a happy, healthy, and unholy library of music

I've got somewhere between 3-4 hundred GB of music on my harddrive which I know I'll never listen to because 90%+ of my listening comes from what I own, or what's on my ipod (which a lot of is the same thing)

My ipod is 120GB, so I put all the albums on that I KNOW I really like and enjoy, not just ones that I heard twice and kind of liked a bit. Ones that I know I could come back to and really enjoy, the favourites, the ones where I often think "man I really want to listen to this." Then the rest of the space I used for bands I've heard a lot of things about, so I'll have the availability to listen to them when I'm out and about. Usually a mix of all the genres I like, so if I'm in the mood for grindcore, or ambient, or shoegaze etc, but don't know what band, I can try something new. When I hear them, if I like them I'll keep them, and if not I'll delete them from my ipod, (though I'll still keep it on my hard drive oddly enough...) and instead put new things on to try out. Trying to listen to 100 new releases in a week is pointless. I've done that before, liked albums and never gone back to them because I wanted to listen to more new stuff. Albums have to grow. When I buy a CD it stays on top of my hi-fi, and doesn't get put away until I listen to it (99/100 I buy are ones I've heard anyway so know I like) so I definitely get to know the album at least a bit, before it gets put away and possibly not touched for months. Albums on my ipod get at least a play before being deleted (unless it was really bad in which case I'll delete all stuff by them, heard or not)

This way I listen to all the stuff I know I like a lot, but get a decent string of new stuff as well. But given that most of what I listen to is what I already own on CD or vinyl, it's not often more than 2-3 releases a week. This week I've ben listening to a lot of new grindcore, but when releases are ~12 minutes you can listen to them all a few times without sucking all your time away.

I do more or less the same thing in order to try out new music. It's how I find out what I need to buy. I'll load a couple of gigs onto my iPhone at a time, and listen to it on shuffle while at work. I rate individual songs on their own merit, without even necessarily knowing which particular band is playing. After awhile I'll sync back up with iTunes. If it turns out that an album has a lot of highly rated songs overall, it goes on the list. Once I buy the CD I burn it and replace the mp3 files with better quality ones. If it turns out that the album isn't that great overall I just delete all the files.

There are way more bands than I could ever possibly remember, so I keep a list of what I've heard and what I thought of it at the time. When I go internet shopping, I link through the archives if possible so they get a cut. I've found some great & obscure stuff this way.

thank you all for your input. To be honest i completely agree with all the posts saying "the albums require multiple listenings to be fully appreciated, ect." But I am a hardheaded individual, and will continue down this path of going through album by album.

After thats done is when im planning on an even harder editing process, i.e. listening to the album front to back.

Thanks again! lets me know im not alone.


and whomever said quantity over quality, that is so true. I used to have a problem, now im having to backtrack through years of downloading before listening

You're only listening to The Gathering or Anneke.

Not ONLY listen to them but yes I do a lot. But 3/4 years ago practically all I listened to was new stuff, so at least I've got to the point where I appreciate what I've already got and don't have to be listening to new stuff all the time.

This week I've found and gotten into Cloud Rat, Water Torture, thedowngoing and cellgraft.

I would recommend you to tag the music so, later, you can know WHY did you download it (style, similar artist,...).

I used to download lots of shit too but problem solved by itself when my hard drive has broken twice afterwards. Those albums i forgot, i did not need. Nowadays its possible to listen lots of stuff through youtube, even full albums, so its easier to filter worthless stuff out. Quality over quantity indeed.

Regular purges improve your collection and help you focus on that which is truly important to you. Don't go overboard, but if you've pretty well figured you're not into triphop, no reason to keep all that triphop you'll never listen to, right? Better fewer but better.

I actually deleted my whole library and I quit subscribing to Spotify. I found that having everything so easily available made me not enjoy listening to music. Now I have started to buy cd's again, used for 1-3 pounds on ebay. And just listen the whole records through. I officially hate the internet, because my "ADD" goes all over the place when I am logged on. So I will always get distracted by something while listening to music.

Yeah basically you nees to train yoirself to start sampling eveeything before you download, when I used to have a 50gig download limit I used to download anything anyone talked up, because it actually took less work than hunting for samples, and as such my old computer has hundreds of unlistened albums just sitting there in my still to check out pile after many years, it took a reduction to an 8gig limit to change my approach, and it certainly does make new music acquisition less daunting, if slower.

With that said I couldn't do an 8or 32 gig ipod, I've got five gigs left on my 160gb one and for the life of me I can't think of what to remove.

just started the same thing today. only I skim through most tracks on the album, since bands can vary a lot, and it might just take an interesting riff to influence my decision.

I'm vaguely doing it genre by genre, hoping it'll make things smoother.

I'm just somewhat ranking albums, because this process is so rough that I'll have to come back to things. the goal for me is to prioritize things so that I don't spend a lot of time on less promising music for my taste.
so, I drop albums into the appropriate folder:
1. stuff I'd like to hear in full immediately
2. stuff I should hear in full eventually
3. stuff I may like, but there's no great urgency
4. indifferent (don't dislike it, but maybe though the style is good there may be no great songs)
5. not really feeling it...but maybe skim again some day
6. kinda shit, but could have some good riffs buried in there somewhere
7. crap that is probably utterly dreadful and worthless to me no matter when I try to give it a chance.

the last four categories are albums I want to just throw away on an external drive somewhere to be forgotten about unless I have some need for them (a friend likes the genre, etc.)...because I suck at parting with acquisitions, even if they've become burdens.
the first three are ones I'll keep locally on the computer, even though it could be years before I'm in the mood for throwing that third folder on shuffle and seeing if I stumble across anything catchy out of what is currently (I'm about 10% of the way through) about 40-hours worth of music.

hah. yea!

I was once a big fan of hip-hop.
I still have all my favorite songs on the computer (about 3,000...maybe 300 I still listen to), but at the time I had too small a hard drive to keep the albums on, and I lost my CD-R collection of about 300+ albums years back ... and I've had next to no inclination to recover 95% of them.

there's definitely a blessing to losing the things you cling to.

(hell, I even struggled to finally part with my optical backups of what is already on my local drive and backed up electronically. ... big box of crap I didn't need!)

I have a little over 1.5TB of music so I'm pretty overwhelmed when it comes to picking something to listen to. I constantly tell myself I should delete a lot of it, but I have way too many albums that are near impossible to come by without paying the equivalent of a month's rent plus all the time and effort it took to accumulate my collection. My other problem is that I have musical ADD, I keep jumping between genres on a daily basis and for some reason I can't listen to whole albums anymore.

holy shit! and I thought I had an unimaginable amount.

I bit the bullet and went through blindly erasing about 40gig of music without hearing it. Most of it bands I had no interest in, stuff that I would prob appreciate but would never sit through an entire album, and so forth.

im on my way to getting all my library to fit on my 160 gig ipod! cant fucking wait!

the devil in me wants to introduce you to the wonderful world of podcasts ... education, entertainment, comedy...every week, free*.

...there goes another 150 gigs.

*if we include Teaching Company, that's another 100 gigs for the audio-only versions.

ive never listened to any podcasts. But theres no way id delete the majority of my library

Doing so will make you happy, successful, and purposeful.

is there anything you're a big fan of other than music? (football, philosophy, movies, sex, comedy, etc.)

?!? That's NOT good.

big fan? usually the paranormal, I am already a subscribed member to Coast to Coast AM! and as far as comedy I usually put on Pandora. To be honest, music is the one thing that outshines all else with my interest. And its not just metal, its pretty much everything besides pop country, pop rap, techno, and other types of dance music.

also... i think ive come to the conclusion that I am going to start deleting massive amounts of my music library and just focus on albums bands that I already know and appreciate. As far as downloading anything, I guess im going to start doing it in a smarter fashion... like sampling it before hand! duh! jesus, what was I thinking...

The hardest part about trying to do this is learning how unorganized your music folder is and not downloading new stuff to listen to.

I ended up putting roughly 5 gb into a different folder of stuff I dont listen to now, but might eventually. Ive found new bands on various blogs. I ended up deleting Slayers Bostaphs albums, except DI. I tried the Bush era Anthrax albums, but those only lasted or day or so.
My mp3 player is 64 gb and never thought Id nearly fill it up.

I've got my 60 GB of music nearly perfectly tagged and organized. It's only 60 GB because everything I feel is superfluous gets deleted immediately. Foobar2000 with the foo_facets plugin is an excellent tool to keep your digital music collection tidy and organized, given you know how to use it properly.

hmm. it's promising that you're up for kicking back and listening to 40+ minutes of people talking...since that's all podcasts are (some people just don't seem to care for it).

I listened to Coast to Coast AM for years, back before I'd heard of The Teaching Company and all the other stuff out there (back then, The Infidel Guy was about the only podcast around, in fact, Skepticality was one of the first podcasts, and they had a brief spot on Coast to Coast one night ).

I don't know what your interest in the paranormal is...if you're not a fanatical believer (e.g., likely to be offended/insulted), but just intrigued n shit, you might like some of the skeptic podcasts out there (two of the big names are Skeptoid (dull scripted(researched and carefully worded) show, but look at the archive, it will almost certainly have an episode addressing any paranormal thing you're interested in, and Skeptics' Guide to the Universe (more chatty magazine format with guest interviews).). There's also Point of Inquiry, which, like Coast to Coast, is also often discussing all kinds of political/conspiracy issues as well as paranormal type stuff, except it has a liberal and skeptical/scientific bias (featuring guests like Neil deGrasse Tyson, rather than Alex Jones)


well, if I link an ep of a few different shows, would you give it a spin, see if any appeals? (it'll be hit or miss what hosts and guests you like, but it'll give you a sense of whether or not it's worth looking for more of, and beats searching and picking out what might be a dud episode).


I think there are music podcasts, too, I've just never listened to any


lol. I do that more nowadays (before broadband, not really an option...easier to download while I sleep than try to stream things).
cool that you're able to just delete it all, but it perplexes me...why not just throw it on another hard drive and forget about it? can always delete it a year from now if you need the space and haven't given second thought to hearing any of it.

i would definitely give a few a listen. much appreciated man! also ill dig into those others that you referenced as far as the paranormal/conspiracy theories go. And you right about just moving the stuff instead of deleting it. I do already have an external harddrive with everything backed up. I tend to jump from one extreme to the other! hah, thanks for the suggestions again!