Right now, it's just about 10GB, and even then there's a good amount of stuff that I could do away with.

Don't tell the RIAA, but its prob 350 gigs.... most i don't listen to I just enjoy pissing off the RIAA.

40GB...every single song is 100% legitimate. I have the bookshelves full of CDs to prove it - though nowhere near as many as the guy in the pic above.

i dont understand. i have a 60 gig and an 80gig ipod full, plus a few gigs on my computer and a 160 gig external harddrive that i use to back it all up.
but i own 99.9% of all that stuff on cd in my 1,500 cd collection

Sad to say I am in the 300+ category. Had to add in an additional hard drive to my mac because I like to download the discography of band I enjoy. Even some I just found out about I will download whatever they have released.

Eh, only 13 gigs for me.

~12300 songs, 96GB, 0% legit. its all on my 160GB iPod classic and my current favs on my 8GB iPhone.

am i going to jail?

I only get musics that i like,,,,its 11 GB now....

I heard all of them. Could probrably shrink it by half if i needed to...

I started collecting CD's since the late 1980's.

Then started digitizing my CDs and vinyls to MP3 in the mid-1990's.

Then along came Napter in the later 1990's, and digital music became the main format.

Since then, I have bought and digitized more and more music.

As of today, I have a 500 GB hard drive almost full with my music collection.

@TallDudeFromBrazil: Agreed, quality over quantity any day.

My digital music collection is mostly a subset of my CD/vinyl music collection...

Which is substantial.

But not obsessive.

Honestly.

I only have 13.6 gigs...I feel unworthy.

A few years ago, I had a hard drive failure and lost everything: pictures, documents, videos, music. I miss the pictures and documents, haven't done anything really to replace the videos or the music.

Of course it was 40 gigs, so obviously I deleted a lot of it... Oops.

@Samifumi: That's why you back stuff up, well you sure learned you lesson I hope.

Mahahah, yes, I deleted about 30 gigs of music on purpose! I'm so evil! In my defense, it was heavy metal, country, and other crap I don't remember where it came from.

Yay for Canadian downloading laws... my collection is around 55GB

Organizing my ID3 tags is like an obsession. As of last night, I was pushing 76,000+ songs - about 387GB worth. Not many are FLAC or WAV, I'd say average 256Kbps MP3.

Happy to say I listen to nearly all of it as I'm on my computer about 18 hours of each day.

120gb I think

Holy shnikeys 300gb!?!?! I'm surprisingly in the popular range, 21-40, and of course most of it is "borrowed" from the a ton of my IP friends.

Haha, 67.345.23.578, good one!

@bbfreak:

I once bought a 500GB external harddrive to back up my stuff. I transferred about 250GB of data onto the external and next day it crashed and lost all that info. That's why I find external HDD's worthless. That's why I don't feel the need to back stuff up, lesson learned.

IM at 876.07gigs of music most of it from online and my biggest collection is teh grateful dead with 85 gigs of live show. i hope thats legal

I have a little over 135 GB. I have heard most of it too. Its about 50% legit and 50% jacked.

Fuck you RIAA.

Quick note: Yes, my music collection is also a subset of my CD/vinyl collection, and I am used to digitizing at very high rates (320 Kbps most of the time). This, of course, creates very large digital files.

I like good sound quality overall, and I often can't stand overtly compressed music. Call me an audio snob, but I can tell when it's poorly compressed and it bothers me a little.

I'm sure if I were using the average 128 Kbps compression, my collection would be one third the size it is today (probably 150 GB instead of 400+ GB).

110GB, all at 256 AAC, 85% legit.

80 - 100 due to a lot of .flac discogs.

176GB and I wish I had more. There are still a ton of albums I want but cannot afford to buy and aren't available through the news groups.

70gb+ all 320kbs or better.

99 Gig, compressed but not lossy (FLAC). Survey should accommodate for differing file types - eg, 99G of MP3 is lot more hours of music than 99G of WAV files.

...close to a terabyte, but I collect in FLAC format.

I also have a translated version in AAC format for mobility.

When I hear distortion in select songs that are mp3 or AAC encoded, I go back to the FLAC and encode in a higher rate.

Ideally I want to carry at least a third of my collection in FLAC format, if not all of it.

Apple has AAC and mp3; so why not ALAC and FLAC? Is that too much to ask to put into iTunes and iPod?

Damn, so close to that magic 300Gb mark! I'm just under that now, all stored on a home server so I can listen to any of it wherever I have a net connection.

I think about 80-100Gb of mine is "legitimate," meaning that I own the original CD from which the music was ripped.

I download alot of live music in FLAC and Shorten formats from bit torrent sites. I convert to Wave files and store on CD's. I must have 400 to 500GB's of that alone. Not to mention another 500 commercial CD's and whatever is on my HD at the time (another 20 Gigs). My wife says "when are you gonna listen to all of that?" It's CRAZY! You can find a great Live Music Download resource at Dave's Music Links. Also check out Darkstarjamblog if your into Jambands and the Dead.

110 GB, all legit with CD backups

Does anyone remember the story of a guy who was trying to archive every song ever? anyone know if he ever pulled it off? Would LOVE A LINK to that story.

my music library is only 10GB or so (100% legit), but with all of my TV shows and movies my iTunes library is well over 300GB. (so that I can stream to my Apple TV)

I have 350GB of music. The rest of my 2 TB is movies.

Digital Smigital
Its Analog + Vynal all the way man.

My music collection is as big as the CDs I legally purchased!

FTW

@NeoAkira: Yeah, that's kind of like not buying insurance because after the day after you bought your last insurance policy you were in an accident...

@brutek:
Same here. I like the fact that Apple at least started to sell music encoded at higher rates (320 kbps) through iTunes Plus.

If space is not an issue (either on an iPod Classic or using a large hard drive), it is the way to go. Encoding at higher or lossless rates always involves very large audio files (25 MB or more for a song that's usually under 5 MB if encoded at 128 Kbps).

Like you, I was a bit peeved with the compression levels in MP3. I use AAC at 320 Kbps, and recently I started to play around with FLAC. My only concern is making sure that the format I use for my music is compatible with other devices (my iPod), and that it passes the test of time. I want to be able to enjoy my high-quality digital music in the future.

Geeze, lots of music, hopefully you somehow listen to it all. I mean the shuffle feature pretty much sucks, and isn't nearly as smart as it should be. Which is why I downgraded from 40 gigs to 13, I only want stuff I actually want to listen to. Everything else goes away, granted I've a long way to go till I'm done adding to my collection but like I said before quality instead of quantity for me.

1) What sort of crazy world do we live in where CD's aren't considered "Digital Music?"

2) On average, those who are "legit" probably pay about $1 per song -- whether your legit digital music is from a CD you ripped or from some online store. Say the average compressed song is about 5 MB. That's 200 songs per gigabyte. $200/GB. Got 10 GB of legit MP3/AAC/Whatever? That's $2000. 100 GB? Try $20,000.

3) Let me just repeat that: if you've really got 100 GB of legitimately paid for digital music, you may well have paid $20,000 for it . Over 300 GB? You're dangerously close to $100,000 on music!

4) Holy cow! That's just shocking for me to think about (I'm not judging...we've all got our own tastes...)

I have about 60GB of music, but I think I only actively listen to about 15-20GB at anytime.

only 30 gb, but i mean, thats about 6000 songs, I don't see any anyone needs more music than this. Then again my brother does own more than twice this much in CDs and its way more impressive to see than digital music.

150 GB, circa 60% from my own CDs, most of the rest from friends' CDs, which is/was totally legal in my country.

Now what I find more interesting is how my interest in all that music *dropped* when that collection was expanded from the CDs I had purchased myself (3-5 per month) to what friends were willing to share: "Hey, here is a hundred CDs worth of music; help yourself." I thought that a bigger collection would be a gift, but now I find myself listening to *less* music.

Someone once said "The things I wanted made me happier than the things I got." True, for whatever reason.

8GB or so.

Are you asking to find out hard drive size or quantity of songs

CD's are digital, dumbass.

@ideaman2020:

Same here.

@Boognish:

How big your song collection is.

~240 gigs and probably 99% of it is legit. The only stuff I download is things I can't buy, I'm a lossless weenie so the total number of songs isn't that huge compared to some other people.

@EQC:

I bought my first vinyl in 1981. I purchased my first CD in 1987. I have been an avid music collector for nearly 30 years now. If I were to calculate all the money I've paid in records, I would get depressed indeed. :(

Although I got rid of most of my vinyls (Ebay), I still keep around many of my original CDs, especially those I really like. Sentimental value, I guess.

I'm right in the middle of the pack - 25GB, hardly any of it is paid for, and I barely listen to any of it - in fact a lot of it is crap, but thanks to torrents when I want a particular song I just usually download the entire album or even the artist's discography.

Since their is such a vast library of music available if you are willing to infringe on the artist's copyright (or alternatively share it with the worldwide network of your friends). It is a waste of resources to back any of this up since it is only a couple clicks away.

My home music collection is 133GB of FLAC files consiting of 409 albums/5472 tracks. That collection is duplicated on my antique 3G iPod in the car as 21GB of 128K MP3. All legal, 99.9% ripped from original CD which are stored away or very small number of Amazon.com downloads.

It might have been better to ask how many tracks vs how much space since different people are going to store in different compression rates or formats.

I get all my music from the iTunes store, which also sells videos as you all must know, so my tunes and my TV shows are mixed together, so most of my 24 GB music collection, space-wise, is probably videos.

81GB here, of which 70% is in Apple Lossless and another 30% in uncompressed AIFF.

There are starting to be sites (e.g. Linn Records) which offer 24/96 files, so I expect I'll be up in the 300GB range by this time next year.

Currently almost all of these are from my CD collection.

Why in God's name do you people have more than 10,000 songs? I can't even THINK of 10,000 songs!

Well, the type of file should also be taken in consideration. mp3s? wave? tiff?

*aiff, not tiff (CS on the brain...)