What Is Too Much?

Currently I am wondering what size my next external harddrive should be. The current one is 80GB and is almost full, mainly from music.

iTunes tells me that I have just shy of 50GB of music, 12359 songs, 37 days + 7 1/2 hours worth of music on the harddrive. This might seem excessive, especially since there are almost 2000 songs (almost 6 days worth) I have yet to listen to. At one point I was down to a day and half of unplayed music, but this has changed and I add albums faster than I can listen to them.

But how can you turn down the chance to burn 5 Miles Davis Box sets (an entire days worth of music!) in the span of a month? How can you not get excited skimming through the promo box at work thinking 'Sweet! I don't have to buy this. Sharon, I will be returning this cd tomorrow' or 'I think I've heard of this band, what the hell, let me burn it.'

Obsessed? Clearly. But iTunes is so much fun. And for people who are obsessive/compulsive about listing things (like me), its pure heaven. It tells me the first song added to my iTunes 'Eat It' by Weird Al (added 1/28/03 at 12:09 pm), most played 'Shake your Rump' & 'High Plains Drifter' (both by Beastie Boys, at 33 times), that its been 30 months since I listened to 'Is There Anybody Here That Love My Jesus' by Medeski, Martin & Wood (last played on 8/12/03) and that if you played every song longer than 10 minutes on my harddrive (360 of them) it would take 3 days, 14 hours 40 minutes and 29 seconds.

This might be too much. But, its never been easier to make mix CDs. I can type in almost any word and pull up at least a full cds worth of music, and since it finds the sequence of letters, not the word, you get all sorts of things. The word 'turd' pulls up a suprising number of songs, like those with the word Saturday. Or if I want to make a CD of 5 star rock songs from 1970-1975 between 4 & 5 minutes long I can with no problem because there are 43 of them on the harddrive.

So, again, is it too much? Probably. Do I care? Hell no. I love music and you never know when you might need 6 different versions of 'What A Wonderful World'.