I have a lot of music. At the time of this blog my home theater computer (where I keep all my music digitally) says I have 4 weeks, 6 days, 2 hours, 22 minutes, and 52 seconds worth of music. That total is about to change as the wife and I made a visit yesterday to Half Priced Books where I hit the clearance CD section and bought 20 more CDs This should push me very close to 5 weeks of music (if I listened to it 24x7).
I admit that I have a problem. I will buy almost any CD for $1 (or $0.50 if it is at my favorite pawn shop). At a dime (or a nickel) a song, they don’t all have to be winners. This used to cause closet space issues until I began keeping only the CD sleeve and chucking the CD case in the trash. Even then, if you have enough CDs it is still a problem.
Other than CDs that I have converted to mp3, my collection also contains music from other sources. I have some LPs that I have converted myself using my USB LP that I bought on clearance at Bed, Bath and Beyond a while back. I have also resorted to finding copies of these LPs (and some cassettes) online via torrent (or other) sites. Some of my more recent music was purchased from the Amazon mp3 store (they have $5 album sales sometimes) and a few albums are left over from when I subscribed to the eMusic service around 10 years ago. I deleted a lot of that music a while back (including about 20 hours of John Coltrane music) as I was running out of space (and really, how much John Coltrane do I really need?). I also have a few albums that I technically do not own but are hopelessly out of print and cannot be purchased anywhere. As I organized my music collection, I began marking the folders containing the albums by prefacing them with LP, Cassette, eMusic or OOP so I could keep track of where the music came from originally.
This summer I started to work from home more. With the kids home full time, the wife made her case (for her sanity and the overall well being of the house) that I should be home more. I spent a little money on a better phone (my old one interfered with our wireless router), headset (the old one died a while back and I was using one that used to work with a cell phone that I no longer have), desk (a nice, 50% off sale at Staples at just the right time) and then moved everything into a corner in our bedroom (our house is small so there really was no other place with any privacy if I needed to be on a conference call). Our ISP is only about 98% reliable so I reluctantly signed up for a MiFi device to get me 5GB worth of data per month from the 3G network thus allowing me a back up should the normal internet go down. This last purchase / commitment was to ease the fears of my manager that I would be available during normal business hours. I like working from home as it allows me the chance to listen to music. This brings me to the title of this blog.
I have a 250 GB external hard drive and I copied my entire mp3 collection over to it and hooked it up to my work PC. The music takes up about 1/3 of the hard drive space and leaves plenty of room for backing my work files up (the original intent of purchasing it years ago). At first I simply listened to whatever music struck my fancy for that day but then I had an idea. Why not listen to everything? I thought about this a bit and thought that it would make sense to limit my listening only to those CDs that I have purchased. This meant hunting down all the directories that were flagged as LP, Cassette, eMusic or OOP and removing them from my hard library. I then removed any CD that was a single or extended single so I was only listening to complete albums. Once I did all that cleaning I was left with about 800 albums.
Next I had to decide in what order to listen to them. I could listen to them alphabetically by artist but then I remembered that I have 6 or 8 Reba McEntire CDs (don’t judge me!). There are a few other artists that I own many CDs by and I think I would abandon this project if I listened in this order. I think thought about creating a playlist of all the songs then hitting “randomize” and then “play”. In the end I decided to listen to them in alphabetical order by album title. If I listen to 3 or 4 albums a day (which is not likely) then I can be done in about a year (plus a few more weeks added in for any CD I might purchase during that time).
Now that I had my collection pared down and my plan in place I created a spreadsheet (of course!) and started listening…
| # | Artist | Album | Date | Again? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Benjamin Gate | ["untitled"] | Yes | |
| 2 | Phil Collins | ...But Seriously | July 21, 2011 | Yes |
| 3 | Charlie Peacock | ...in the light The Very Best of Charlie Peacock | July 22, 2011 | Yes |
| 4 | Jacob's Trouble | ...let the truth run wild | July 22, 2011 | Yes |
| 5 | Baha Men | 2 Zero 0-0 | July 22, 2011 | Yes |
| 6 | Idle Cure | 2nd Avenue | July 25, 2011 | Yes |
| 7 | Arrested Development | 3 Years, 5 Months And 2 Days In The Life Of | July 25, 2011 | Yes |
| 8 | 4 Him | 4 Him | July 25, 2011 | No |
| 9 | Snow | 12 Inches Of Snow | July 25, 2011 | Yes |
| 10 | 12 Stones | 12 Stones | July 26, 2011 | Yes |
| 11 | Caedmon's Call | 40 Acres | July 26, 2011 | Yes |
| 12 | Tree 63 | 63 Sessions | July 26, 2011 | Yes |
| 13 | Tree 63 | 63 | July 27, 2011 | Yes |
| 14 | Miss Angie | 100 Million Eyeballs | July 27, 2011 | Yes |
| 15 | Blindside | About A Burning Fire | July 27, 2011 | Yes |
| 16 | Aaron Pelsue Band | Aaron Pelsue Band Live | July 28, 2011 | Yes |
| 17 | U2 | Achtung Baby | July 28, 2011 | Yes |
| 18 | Adiemus | Songs Of Sanctuary | July 28, 2011 | Yes |
| 19 | Savage Garden | Affirmation | July 28, 2011 | Yes |
| 20 | Al Denson | Al Denson | July 28, 2011 | No |
| 21 | Skillet | Alien Youth | July 29, 2011 | Yes |
| 22 | Steven Curtis Chapman | All About Love | July 29, 2011 | Yes |
| 23 | Stellar Kart | All Gas. No Brake | July 29, 2011 | Yes |
| 24 | Bloodgood | All Stand Together | July 29, 2011 | Yes |
I added a column to record if I would consider listening to the CD ever again. So far only 2 have earned a No in that column. I found it odd that I own 3 CDs whose titles begin with period of ellipsis. Different programs sort non alphabetical characters differently and for whatever reason Windows Media Player has the bracket symbol “[“ before periods and both before numbers. Also, in a strict alphabetical sense, 12 should come before 2 or 2nd and 100 Million Eyeballs should have been #5 on the list but I let that slide. If I am to be in this for the long haul I cannot be nitpicking on day 3. The above list is really 1 1/2 week’s worth of listening but I had a slow start last week and did not want to blog about it should I have given up early.
Here are my thoughts on a few of these CDs that I have listened to over the past 2 weeks…
- Charlie Peacock “…In The Light The Very Best Of”: Charlie has got to be my favorite artist. I have followed him since his first LP (Lie Down In The Grass, which I should get to sometime late this winter since I also own the CD). I own a VHS of him in concert (which I ripped to avi and then stripped the audio and converted to mp3 – which disqualifies it from my listening project). He co-wrote Every Heartbeat (a hit by Amy Grant a while back) and has produced tons of over albums that I own as well. This best of CD was sent to me (for free) by Charlie himself when my wife tried to order 2 of his CDs directly from him and he missed her letter for some reason. He sent the CDs she ordered and 2 more (this one and one that I already owned).
- Baha Men “2 Zero 0-0”: Please don’t think less of me for owning this CD.
- Arrested Development “3 Years, 5 Months And 2 Days In The Life Of”: I can listen to this one over and over, great CD.
- 4 Him “Self Titled”: I have a feeling that all my 4 Him CDs will be listed as a No in the far right column. I got all of them at the Goodwill store in Frankfort, IN for $1 each. I had only heard of them but not really heard them. I figured that anyone with this many CDs must be good, right? Not a big 4 Him fan.
- Snow “12 Inches of Snow”: Even with the lyrics in front of me, there is no way to follow them on “Informer”.
- Blindside “About a Burning Fire”: I love Blindside and have all their CDs as well. Their early stuff is a little to hard for me but a very passionate band. I saw them in concert in Indianapolis a while back with a friend. I listened to this one out of order as the next CD was over 75 minutes and this one was only 45 and I was nearing the end of the work day. I am not going to stick to the list strictly.
- Al Denson “Self Titled”: Chuck this in the pile with 4 HIM. Another Goodwill find. They can’t all be winners folks.
- Steven Curtis Chapman “All About Love”: A good find at the Frankfort Goodwill was about 10 SCC CDs. On this CD (which I confess is the first time I have listened to it straight through) he covers “I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)” originally by The Proclaimers featured in the movie Benny & Joon. I did sing “Moment Made For Worshipping” during a Sunday service once. Well worth the $1 I paid for this CD.
Well, there are my thoughts of Week 1 (well Blog 1 anyway) of what I am calling The Listening Project. More to come for sure.
Jon
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