Some months ago (September to be exact) i was probably bored and in traffic and decided to run with what was a rather unimportant science experiment that i thought of previously.
Namely, i wondered how long it would take to listen to all the music on the USB stick (in my car).
So into my phone i recorded the starting date and time (2019-09-10 at 3:24pm), rewound back to the first track of the first album and let it run.
Through the months i've recorded the progress passing through 'd', 'j', 'p' and 's'. These letters were normally alphabetical 'choke points' where i had a bunch of albums by the same artist or lots of artists with the same first letter. i.e. 'j' had 24 albums worth - john coltrane (x5), john schofield, josh abrahams, jamiroquai (x5), joe satriani, jimi hendrix, john butler, james morrison (x3), jj johnson... etc etc.
It is fair to say that the number of tracks i bypassed (or repeated, as i sometimes do) was kept to a bare minimum (maybe 10 or so) thus representing a reasonably true outcome. Some 'extra tracks' or tracks with lots of rubbish at the end were skipped (looking at you mr bungle).
This, to the point that i even left albums running and dialled down the volume when i really, really, really didn't want to listen to the music (take a bow, pink - i actually listened to my headphones while driving instead).
There were some times when the music was off, and some (rare) times when i had the radio on.
There were 2 albums added during the process boosting numbers slightly but they were added after the letter had be passed ('c' for crowded house, and 'q' for queen).
Anyway, so the experiment started 2019-09-10 and concluded 2019-12-18 some three months later... at 's' for Stevie Wonder.
'So close,' you might say, 'why didn't you finish?'
My work situation has altered greatly in the last three months. I went from a 55-80 minute drive morning and night 5 days a week, then dropped to 3 days a week for the last 2 months of that, and now i'm working from home permanently (yhay, not complaining).
The point being that the exercise was also based on a certain amount of available listening time. The remaining nth portion of the collection could theoretically last years (actually, I'm already into the 't's but consider the experiment done and dusted anyway).
A secondary goal was to try to listened to all the music and find things i didn't know about that might be interesting. To be honest there wasn't much of that in there, plenty of good music but no huge surprise tracks that i've had to study off the clock as it were.
Some numbers...
There are 152 albums of which i listened to 134 of them (88%) and there were 1833 tracks of which i listed to 1642 (89%) of them. Remaining albums is 18 and remaining tracks is 191.
I don't know the running time of all the albums collectively and couldn't be bothered working it out. If we were to propose 3 minutes (and very few of my genres of choice are 'pop') per song @ 1642 songs that's 82 hours or 3 days of solid music.
I guess the point is that if someone goes, 'that will last you years', or 'you could go years and not listen to all of that', maybe they're right, maybe they're not, and there's a sure way to find out.
How bored was i ?!
[update: 2020-01-24. if you've seen the episode of big bang theory where sheldon needs to complete tasks... that.]
Until next time...
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