The history of my iTunes music library.....(submit yours here!)

[Hotsauce]

I started my music library in the late 90's back when Napster was around. I maybe DL around 500 songs at the time, mostly rap and classic rock....as programs like Napster and Kassam became popular, I began swapping my library with my friends. At the time, I had bought a 2gb jump drive. Also, I had a huge CD collection, so I copied all of my CDs to my HD. That jumped my music collection to about 6000 songs....then the government got serious about cracking down on people DL music, so I completely stopped illegally DL music.

Years ago, I met one of my neighbors who "knew someone who worked at Apple". This guy had over 20,000 songs, and over 500 videos formatted for the ipad. I went out and bought a 750 GB HD, and copied his entire library.

Now a days I pretty much have resorted to paying iTunes $.99 per song. I can't tell you the last time I bought a CD though!

Summary: I have about 30,000 songs, which is just about every major album, of every genre from the 1960's-2005, and some really good classic movies like Braveheart, Meet the Parents, etc....

Tell me about yours!

****(PLEASE KEEP ILLEGAL WEBSITE NAMES AND LINKS OFF YOUR REPLIES, THEY WILL BE DELETED BY A MOD)****

[Anybodyhome]

Really more of a history lesson...

I still have albums and even some cassette tapes boxed up in my basement. The difficulty over the years has been trying to keep up with converting my old library to whatever the new medium was/is- albums to cassette to CD to digital (in whatever format). Over the years, I pared down my album collection to just those that are noteworthy and possibly have some value. The few cassette tapes I have could be trashed tomorrow and I wouldn't miss them, but there are some gems there as well.

Back in the day of early FM radio where I grew up in Southern California there were stations not yet "owned" by the record companies and weren't being paid to play. They'd play entire albums during the noon hour, usually one side with a commercial break when they flipped the record over, then the other. I used to record those all the time and have some classics there. They'd also play bootleg recordings from shows in and around the Los Angeles area, some of which were pretty damn good as well.

The CD ruined most collections, including mine, because trying to record a cassette to a CD was just a horrible translation from what was considered to be "digital Dolby sound" to a medium that brought out every piece of noise on the cassette. A lot of purists still prefer the album, claiming the CD is far too sanitized and sterile- which I agree with to a point. There are many cases of albums which were recorded with conversations going on between tracks or odd sounds in the background. Most, if not all occurrences such as that will never be heard again.

From a consumer's perspective, I was then left with deciding which albums and cassettes I wanted to purchase, download, copy or otherwise get my hands on the CD to replace them. Consequently, I now own a few thousand CDs and I haven't purchased a new one in several years. I will, however download a complete CD if it is a "concept CD" or it's just that good to listen to every tune on it. Why would someone only download a couple tracks from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" or The Who's "Tommy?"

Now, approaching 60 years old, I have music on a couple iPods, a laptop, a desktop, couple jump drives... I'm like the mad professor with stuff piled on my desk, flinging stuff around trying to find that one, single song I know I have somewhere....

[Chimera]

I had a few singles i got off P2P networks. when i got my first ipod in 2005, i finally converted by CD collection to digital. I hadn't bought a CD since probably 1999 at that point, but i still had about 300 CDs - mostly grunge and rap from the 1990s. Then i started borrowing CDs from friends and ripping them to my HDD.

I then discovered other "backup" sites where i could download entire albums without worrying about P2P malware.

I got really anal about my itunes collection and wouldn't add anything without the cover art or complete album.

I've since shunned my pirating ways and I keep an eye on itunes for special pricing on albums. For example, i got an Elvis album with 50 hits for $5.99.

I have about 2500 complete albums, including a 50 CD set of the top 1000 songs of the last 30 years.

[Herbert The Love Bug]

Started with a mixture of rap, techno, boy band, pop songs, and some gangster rap

Now I have about 9,000 songs of bluegrass, classic country, and folk