Pete's Log: My MP3 Collection

Entry #2556, (Music)
(posted when I was 46 years old.)

After my recent iTunes ponderings, my brain decided it was time to hyperfixate on organizing/documenting my mp3 collection. So I did a bunch of de-duplication, file/folder name normalizing, ID3 tag fixing, replaygain updating, and documenting.

The upshot of all this is I discovered three albums I own were missing from my MP3 library. The one I'm happiest to have rediscovered is Heroes & Villains: Music Inspired by The Powerpuff Girls, which is an excellent album.

Data sources that proved particularly helpful:

  • iTunes order history
  • Amazon order history
  • Bandcamp receipts
  • An external hard drive with a copy of my iTunes library from 2011ish that still had the original file timestamps intact
  • Pete's Log

So in 2002, my PowerBook was stolen, and with it whatever mp3s I had managed to accumulate by that time. Thanks to the generosity of my friends, I was able to replace the laptop quickly. Unfortunately, I had no backup of the mp3s, since the original esgeroth had died earlier that year. So that marks the genesis of my current MP3 collection. In the fall of 2002, I ripped all my CDs onto that new laptop, and those MP3s are all still with me, representing just over a third of the collection.

In 2004 I started buying digital music from the iTunes store and continued doing so until 2008. In 2011 I bought MP3s from Amazon for the first time and Amazon purchases now account for a quarter of my collection. Although recently I've been trying to avoid Amazon. My first Bandcamp purchase was in 2011, but Bandcamp really started taking off as a source for me in 2022.

For roughly 20% of the collection, I cannot document a provenance. Some of that is CDs I purchased and ripped after 2002, and also I think at one point I ripped some of Mamie's CD collection and at another point Dan let me copy a bunch of MP3s. But none of that is documented anywhere, so the closest I can come is correlating those events to the timestamps in the old copy of the iTunes library I found.

In summary, I am up to 6805 songs with a play length of 16 days, 9 hours, 39 minutes and 18 seconds. The collection takes up 36 GB of disk space.

Some more observations in list form:

  • I have a lot more vinyl I want to rip
  • I thought I had all of Queen's studio albums, but discovered I was missing Jazz. I know I owned it on CD back in the day, so I have no idea what happened there
  • From my Amazon purchases I discovered one purchase wasn't in my library: I Just Can't Stop It by The (English) Beat, purchased in 2014
  • From my old iTunes library I found two of my original CD rips somehow weren't in my library, Heroes & Villains and Americana Deluxe by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
  • I found that of that initial rip of my CD collection, a dozen or so albums are missing a random track. My suspicion is poor quality control on my part when I did the ripping. Not sure how (or if) to remedy this since I no longer have the original CDs.
  • Young Pete had an annoying habit of only mentioning the band name and not the album name when describing new music purchases:
    • I have four Aquabats albums, which one was this?
    • I have two Voodoo Glow Skulls and three Against All Authority albums, which ones were these?
    • I have three Queers albums, which one was this?
    Could be worse, I guess, I could omit the band name entirely...
  • 2012 accounts for 12% of the collection, and seems to be my biggest single music-buying year (by a considerable margin)
  • The documented amount I've spent on music is just under $2,100, but I only have documentation on cost for a handful of the CDs in that original collection, so I've certainly spent much more. It's interesting to look back and feel like the cost of a song/album hasn't really changed much over the past 20+ years
  • I initially titled this "My MP3 Collection" but then changed it to "My Digital Music Collection" because not every file is an MP3. But then I ran the stats and changed it back, because in my head it will always be MP3s and also:
    • MP3: 93.62%
    • M4A: 3.11%
    • OGG: 2.52%
    • FLAC: 0.37%
    • WMA: 0.24%
    • WAV: 0.15%

The weirdest part of the experience was that I felt the exact moment my brain let go of the hyperfixation. It was like a knot loosened and suddenly this just didn't feel as important anymore. I've experienced plenty of hyperfixation before, but usually it ends more gradually. I suspect that if the hyperfixation had held on longer, I could have gotten the percentage of "undocumented" songs lower, but it's probably for the best that I move on.

(Did I mention how awesome Heroes & Villains is? I'm listening to it as I write this and I am so happy to have it back)