The Second Derivative

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.