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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

> I delete things that no longer spark joy. Deleting things is an important part of curation, even if my general inclination is to keep things forever.

I used to think this way, but I had one too many things I acquired, then deleted because I wasn't really listening to it, then years later suddenly wanting to try it again because something just clicked and spending many, many hours having to re-acquire it.

Storage is cheap. I just keep everything and buy a bigger hard-drive.

Most of my headaches these days are around whether I correctly tagged something the first go-round and now having to sync all my backups when I decide I want to reorganize some of my albums.

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Agreed, if you want to curate stuff use playlists, that's what they're for.

For a long time I only collected complete albums. If there was one song I liked I would acquire the entire album and digitize it into my collection. Some of the other songs would go unlistened, and some I even disliked, but I keep them all the same. Over the years many of those other songs have grown on me through their appearances during shuffle-mode sessions, or I've come to appreciate their connection to the other tracks when listening through an album as a whole.

Nowadays a lot of music I listen to is released without anything like the framework of an "album" so I have a harder time using this method, but still I'll often acquire additional tracks (or an entire discography) from an artist I find interesting with no immediate intent of listening to them.

Most definitely. With some albums it might have taken 5 - 10 years for my taste in music evolve and them to start hitting differently.

How many songs do you have in your collection?

How is that relevant in 2023? IANP, but my flash thumb drive in a car has 3500 songs on it, representing a small fraction of the total.

The last time I tried to count, it crashed Kodi. :)

Let's just say 1.5 TB worth. Mostly 192kbps mp3s and higher, but maybe 10% or more FLAC.

Wow! I can't imagine how I would ever do justice to a 1.5TB collection. My own collection is only 100GB or so (I regularly prune).

Your collection crashing Kodi is one of those signals your behavior is far outside the norms, nearly technically infeasible given current system .

One idea that keeps me up at night is a collection that expires itself. It’s probably like an LRU cache for music, reflecting a life-cycle that’s self-contained.

I find so much joy in hearing a song I love(d) but haven't heard in ages. Music that expires if I don't listen to it feels almost like disrespecting my past self. Sometimes my historical tastes were amazing; sometimes I'm glad I moved on; either way, I'm glad to have a record of those times and to revisit and reminisce. One can still be nostalgic about bad taste, and certainly for hits we've forgotten we've loved.

I agree with everything you said. The dream is not to compromise any of that while also expiring that which you no longer need.

There’s a passage in Infinite Jest that describes the logical point that a quantity of meat exists that I will eat over the course of my life and it could be stored in a substantially large enough room.

Similarly with our music collections, if you will, there’s only so many tunes left. The excess is what is wasteful.

> nearly technically infeasible given current system

I don't know if I'd quite put it that way. Maybe infeasible for one application or another (I have no experience with Kodi). But it's not hard to simply have that many files on a hard drive, in a standard Artist/Album directory structure.

Assuming 5MB per .mp3, 1.5TB is about 300K songs. No problem for a standard filesystem these days.

Maybe mirror it with another 1.5TB drive for safety, and you should be good to go for a long time.

Not even close. Its using the right tools for the job. I have over 250k tracks in flac. Navidrome and plex handle it just fine.

No, it just signals that Kodi is unsuitable for the task at hand. Generalizing the capabilities of a decidedly non-mainstream application like Kodi to what is technically feasible is a bit daft.

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