Music Library on your Mp3 player/computer?

[brahmslover]

For those of you who have a "music library" on your mp3 players or computer, approximately how much memory do you need to fit in all the popular works of a single composer (I know it varies greatly depending on the composers, but what's the ballpark like?)

[abj]

I had every opus work, roughly 140 pieces, of Beethoven on my computer at one point, which amounted to a little less than 1000MB, if I remember correctly. And judging that half of Beethoven's compositional output can be considered 'popular' (meaning familiar to almost any listener), I say 500MB, more or less a hundred (it depends on the quality of the file).

[brahmslover]

Thanks, wow, 1Gb, that's actually less that I thought.

[perfect_pitch]

Well - my Beethoven Library on my MP3 player is 4Gb... And to clarify, I have all 9 Symphonies (2 different recordings), Piano Concerti, Piano Sonatas, Variation works, Sonatas for Violin and Piano

and most of them have at least 2 different recordings of each.

[retrouvailles]

Personally, for me it can vary from anywhere between 1 GB and 14 GB for some composers. There is no hard and fast rule, even for some composers like Milhaud, who's opus numbers reached beyond 300.

[richard black]

The complete CD sets of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and Haydn are all in the region of 100-150CDs. One CD typically requires around 700MB on a computer drive, uncompressed, so that's order of 100GB. Stored as MP3 files that will require about one tenth as much space, so about 10GB. (That's taking the most common MP3 bitrate, 128kbps.) Quite a thought that you can get the complete works of any three of those on a single SDHC card!

[lontano]

For those of you who have a "music library" on your mp3 players or computer, approximately how much memory do you need to fit in all the popular works of a single composer (I know it varies greatly depending on the composers, but what's the ballpark like?)

That's a tough question. And I can't answer it, partly because there are very few composers that I've ever had a desire to have "the complete works of". Running a good college music library for 16 years allowed me to become familiar with all the best work of most of the "great composers" from every period, and once I retired I really had no desire to recreate a personal copy of all that, so I worked more on creating a library of music that was new to me. So, currently I have many hundreds of CDs, of which a great deal has been moved to a 500GB hard drive. Currently I have 27,000 files (mostly mp3s) in 2,500 directories, occupying just under 150GB of that HD (with a mirrored copy on a separate PC). It's an amazing amalgam of everything from the very fringe of the musical concept, to the mainstay of the great masters. Chances are though, when I die all of this will most likely get lost in the shuffle of disbursing my remains (not that I'm intending on dying any time soon, but I'm not getting any younger  ). Likewise, in 10-15 years today's hard drives will no doubt be replaced by solid-state storage, possibly in the clouds, and any perceived value my collection has will be meaningless to the rest of the world.

Sorry for not answering your question 
 

[brahmslover]

That's a tough question. And I can't answer it, partly because there are very few composers that I've ever had a desire to have "the complete works of". Running a good college music library for 16 years allowed me to become familiar with all the best work of most of the "great composers" from every period, and once I retired I really had no desire to recreate a personal copy of all that, so I worked more on creating a library of music that was new to me. So, currently I have many hundreds of CDs, of which a great deal has been moved to a 500GB hard drive. Currently I have 27,000 files (mostly mp3s) in 2,500 directories, occupying just under 150GB of that HD (with a mirrored copy on a separate PC). It's an amazing amalgam of everything from the very fringe of the musical concept, to the mainstay of the great masters. Chances are though, when I die all of this will most likely get lost in the shuffle of disbursing my remains (not that I'm intending on dying any time soon, but I'm not getting any younger  ). Likewise, in 10-15 years today's hard drives will no doubt be replaced by solid-state storage, possibly in the clouds, and any perceived value my collection has will be meaningless to the rest of the world.

Sorry for not answering your question 
 

Why so gloomy? You can donate your music collection to developing young musicians. I thought about the future of my music lib after I die as well (although it may be way too early as I just finished college), and I think it would be nice for them to have "instant" access to music. When I was in college, I so wished that I could listen to the pieces whenever we mentioned a piece in theory/history/music literature class.

[lontano]

Why so gloomy? You can donate your music collection to developing young musicians. I thought about the future of my music lib after I die as well (although it may be way too early as I just finished college), and I think it would be nice for them to have "instant" access to music. When I was in college, I so wished that I could listen to the pieces whenever we mentioned a piece in theory/history/music literature class.

Well I certainly trust you have a long and prosperous future ahead (assuming you've graduated college in your early-mid 20's, rather than waiting a few decades)! As personal computer technology rapidly morphs from my very first VIC-20 (5000 bytes of RAM and a cassette tape recorder for excruciatingly slow loading/saving - about 20 min to load my favorite program at the time), to the power-tower desktop I bought last year (the video card alone has 1 gigabyte + 4 more for the system), all sorts of laptops, and such - things will be quite different, no doubt barely recognizable when you approach your 60's (or if medical advancements offer an additional 20-30 useful years to the average life-span (I have a 60 year-old friend stationed in Iraq, a citizen computer specialist working for the US Army who still thinks HE will live over 1000 years! I have no idea why!)).

My point being, digital music formats, storage and playback will all be vastly different 30 years from now (if we suffer no great calamity), but if you want to put your name on a list of folks who want to inherit my digital (and substantial sheet) music collection, be my guest; just don't plan on collecting anything anytime (especially soon!). I'm just 60, and while my health is not great, I'm not planing on checking out for a while.

L.