The Second Derivative

2010-06-15T18:53:00.000-05:00

Somewhere around two years ago, I completed the music project I had been working on since I first switched from WinAmp to iTunes:I listened to every single track I owned. As long as I was performing the exercise, I thought it would be a good idea to rate each on a five-star scale. This all fed into my over-complicated auto-DJ system I call Shufflesource... yeah, I know. It's a long story, perhaps some other time.

I really wish I could fix a date on the event; in retrospect, I can't believe I didn't record it somewhere. In fact, I should have built a monument, because it was a pretty monumental task. I spent an enormous number of hours sitting in front of the computer listening to music. Fortunately, I spend a lot of time sitting in front of the computer anyway, and listening to music isn't exactly torturous for me, but still... it represented a lot of time, all I'm sayin'.

One thing I do remember about the event is that the track count was just over ten thousand (I think it was 10,830 but who's counting). I remember thinking that it had taken me about 10 years to amass that collection, and wondering how long it would take to download all that data using the internet connection I had when I started building the collection. Then I believe I switched my main playlist from "Uncharted Territory" to "Shufflesource" and started listening to actual, complete albums from start to finish.

I happened to glance at the "Uncharted Territory" playlist yesterday and noticed that I now have almost 5000 unrated tracks in my library. That's up about 500,000% from two years ago, give or take a division by zero error. That means that in the last 24 months I've imported about half as many files as I previously owned, after 10 years of trawling the net for music.

I leave it to the reader to perform the necessary calculus for the implicit rate-of-change problem in this story. Extra credit will be awarded for plotting the growth of my music collection against bandwidth costs of the last decade.

Sadly, I don't have time for such computations. You see, I have around 5000 tiny little decisions to make.

This is the first post written explicitly for my music blog. In the future, I'll try to actually say something about music.

You'll Dance To Anything

The Second Derivative