LP’s: 7500-10,000 (At LEAST 7500).
Cassettes: 500-1000 (too many boxes with tapes mixed in with other stuff to really know)
Reel-To-Reel: 20 (but that’s mostly family stuff from my Wife’s family that I’m gonna convert over to digital at some point, so it probably doesn’t count for the purpose of this list.)
45 RPM records: 200 or so (used to be more, but, regrattably, the largest portion of my collection of 45s went “crunch” (unlabeled box in a storage unit during a move several years back).

As for the “aging, dust-covered” aspect, I’m going to be investing in one of those “vaccuum” machines that a lot of the “archival” places use — sucks the dust and such right off the albums, and gets you a significant improvement in fidelity.

As for why I have such a big collection:
A lot of it was bought up really cheaply from people who were stupid enough to actually believe that they “needed” to buy their entire collection again every time the Corporate MediaPigz came out with a new format. (Same with wall of VHS tapes which I’m probably going to end up digitizing, rather than paying the MPAA scumbags — it’s worth a slight reduction in resolution just to know that I’ve fucked them over by “hiding behind” things like the first-sale doctrine

Plus — and this is the really critical aspect of my collection — almost none of it was “major label” bullshit.

At some point I might start doing one of those “music blogs”, but I dunno — things have been pretty chaotic of late.

Good job!
Ya’d never get any SLEEP!
: )

stw

stw

“should be enough to hold every song ever created”

That’s assuming every song ever created were worthy of that kind of archiving!
Some of us will probably choose to save *some* of that 100TB for something else, only storing the ones that turn us on.
: )

with the recent invention of SSD (Solid State HardDrive), im absolutely certain there will be 100Tb thumbdrive in my lifetime.

should be enough to hold every song ever created..

I dunno. I rather like showing off my cd collection. Sure people who know me already, know that I like music, but do they know which artists I like? Simply by glancing at one of the four cd towers in my living room they can see that I have all but 2 of Led Zeppelin’s albums and a lot of cd’s by “that new band Modest Mouse.” “Hey what’s with all these Modest Mouse albums? I thought they only had that one song from a couple years ago?” If all that is tucked away on my hard drive (which it is, in FLAC) nobody knows my musical passions and a conversation which I might actually enjoy participating in might never be started.

I’ve got a friend who collects vinyl albums and has a couple wall mounts for albums. He switches out which 3 or 4 albums get displayed every month or so. I went over one day and it was a couple Ozzy albums. Went over a couple months later and it was Johnny Cash. Fun stuff if you ask me.

At a time when we’re all using lots of things that wouldn’t have seemed possible years ago, why would you question the logic of a large-capacity flash drive??

Not long ago, lots of concepts were thought to be “too ambitious”, yet we’ve got them now…
- Harddrives of all types have crossed the TeraByte threshold;
- Processors that can handle HD media without “flaking out” are available;
- Koltai’s flash drive in the article has 32GB (that’s way more than some said we’d even reach);
- Most MP3 players aren’t much bigger and can hold quite a bit already;
- Digital cameras handle bigger pictures all the time (I’ve lost track of the latest pixel count).

When I first started with computers, they didn’t have harddrives, and RAM was barely a consideration. You had punch cards… then you had 7″ floppy disks (180KB – 360KB) that would load a *temporary* operating system into a limited memory so you could replace that floppy with a “data” floppy for saving your work.

Some years later, when I worked for Unisys, we were a little excited when they started replacing the existing PCs with ones armed with 20MB harddrives. We thought that was a lot, only to have them replaced again very soon after with 350MB drives and 2MB of RAM (upgradable to 8MB!). At that time, floppies were reduced in size to 3.5″, given the harder case, and held over 1.4MB.

I could go on, but in short…
After that, we watched a long list of consistently evolving technologies come and go so fast, it’s almost a blur to try and remember them all!

I have no doubt we’ll see much bigger thumb drives in the very near future… Along with MAFIAA-launched court cases charging that such a thing “facilitates nothing more than massive piracy” of their entire libraries. (You know, the same way the Cassette Recorder, the VCR and the MP3 Player did.)
; )

stw

kinda makes 1$/song seem incredibly outrageous..

stw