GEOFFREY MORRISON BLOG

In the August issue I initiated a “bold challenge” for you to prove to me that you had more music files than I did. Well I was quite impressed with the number of and the numbers in the responses. And I thought I liked music. Here’s the highlights, in ascending order.

Brodie Wolstenholme
Brodie has over 13,000 music files, with more than 6,000 of them losslessly compressed. Not bad, not bad at all.

Dave Cotell
Dave has 7737 files, but they take up 307 gigabytes. He didn’t specify which encoding he used, but it certainly wasn’t highly compressed with that ratio.

Edit: Dave let me know that it's actually 200 in AAC format and another 7700+ in lossless WAV.

Ryan Mielke
Ryan has “only” 8278 songs, but they’re all Apple Lossless. Nice work.

Frank Bertola
Frank claims he didn’t want to sacrifice any quality, so encoded his 500 CDs as .wav files. 8,207 and 404 GB later, and he claims he’s looking to get additional hard drive soon. I don’t doubt it.

Mark Decker
Mark has 19,814 AAC and MPEG files. HT Contributor and professional pianist John Higgins would approve of his playlist entitled “Rachmaninoff,” so extra points for that.

Ed Ting
In terms of numbers, Ed wins. He has 38,524 mp3s taking up 386 gigabytes. But as I said, those with lossless files get extra points.

Zbigniew Tyrlik
Zbig almost won this thing outright. He has a staggering 28,286 files, all lossless. That’s around 663 gigabytes.

Ben Bowen
But Ben takes the cake. He has, and he sent me screenshots to prove it, over 35 thousand songs. Wait, it gets crazier. Almost all are either lossless or completely uncompressed .wav files. That’s over 1.3 terebytes of data. Now that is dedication. Oddly, more than half are Led Zeppelin bootlegs. How’s that for a resource. Then there’s his backup hard drives…

So who won? I have about 15,000 songs, all encoded as MP3s (wait, don’t yell) almost all at very high bit rates. I still listen to CDs if I’m going to sit down and listen to music, so my files are just for my iPod. Excuses, excuses, I know. The collections of everyone above impressed me, so like I promised they’re all going to get a HD DVD or Blu-ray disc, though perhaps I should have offered to send a new hard drive or two.

One more thing. It took great restraint not to comment on some of the music selections I saw in the supplied screenshots. But I just knew that for every album in my own collection that is nicely esoteric or obscure (say, International Submarine Band) would reveal one that is decidedly not (go Hootie!). That said, I have just one question. What’s with all the ABBA?!? Just kidding. Thanks for all the responses.