Before anyone begins wagging, YES, I ripped them ALL myself…or bought them.
I have three friends with enormous CD collections, and I asked all of them to let me rip them for them in exchange for copies of what I ripped.
I’m pretty sure that I’m now in a pretty rareified group of freaks with insanely eclectic collections of music. Everything from Alternative to Zydeco, Aaron Neville to Zero 7, and a whole bunch of weirdness in between.
Let’s see, let me do a search on the letter combination “ea” (My active library currently contains only 40,000 of the 60…) and pull 20 songs from the middle of the pack:
9,953 items, 30 days of music.
Random Artist sample from that search:
Hendrix
Chet baker
Tom tom club
wu-tang clan
Janis Joplin
yo la tengo
Sam cooke
beck
cacteau twins
the beautiful south
elvis costello
Tom Waits
the Clash
Reverend Horton Heat
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Stony B and Grampa
Sugar Plant
Stone Roses
Muddy Waters
Peter himmelman
Husker Du
Sister Double Happiness
Portishead
Queen
Feist
Corrine Bailey Rae
imogen Heap
Telepopmusik
Sun Ra
Edison Lighthouse
Motorhead
Benny Benassi
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Metallica
Chemical Brothers
Joni Mitchell
Dean Martin
Butthole Surfers
Steve Earle
Brian Eno
Miles Davis
R.L. Burnside
Death Cab for Cutie
And so forth.
By my calculations, if we assume 4 minutes per song, you have 166 days and 16 hours of music. If you can only listen to music for 16 hours a day, that jumps up to 250 days.
The Large Hadron collider is expected to start at the end of September – 220 days from now.
So better start listening. You might be able to get through it all before a black hole engulfs the earth.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I just wanted to point out that this isn’t likely to stop anyone wagging, since borrowing CDs to rip is a distinctly grey area in terms of legality.
Having said that, though, surely your music library tells you how many days/hours/minutes of music you have, and to figure out whether you’ll live long enough is a trivial exercise.
Nothing gray about it. If you don’t own the CDs, you’ve stolen the music.
The math is pretty trivial. If approx 1/6 of the music collection is 30 days of music, there’s about 180 days worth. Figure 8 hours per days of listening – about a year and a half.
You know that, and I know that, but maybe taking the softer approach and informing the OP that he may not be entirely legal with his collection is probably the right way to handle this.
Uhhhh, it’s just a courtesy copy for the friend. I’ll only listen to it when they’re with me, and I’ll check to make sure no other copies are being played at the time…
ETA - My music collection is 1879 tracks, 5.2 days playing time, 9.4GB
The question is - did the company that recorded the music benefit in any way out of your transaction? If the record company didn’t, then the artists didn’t. It seems a funny way to show your appreciation for someone’s work to not pay them…
Your friends haven’t paid you in songs if they still own a copy.
From your description, assuming everyone contributed equally, then each person had 20,000 tracks. Valuing them at $.99 as per iTunes, it implies that each one of you got $39,600.00 worth of music for free. Times three, that’s a big chunk of change that the artists never saw. Just sayin’…
The weird thing about this whole issue is that it was never illegal for me to make casettes for my friends. Just because it’s a whole lot easier now to give away more shouldn’t make it illegal. (And I am not referring to the practice of sharing with the whole world, I’m referring to exactly what happened here - copies for people you actually know.)
It was always illegal for you to make cassette copies for your friends; rather than prosecuting, the recording industry sought to impose a tax on blank recording media.
Also, the cassette copy was sufficiently lower in quality and durability that it was thought that it wasn’t worth the effort to go after home piracy.
The main point I want to make has less to do with the legalities and more to do with what is fair and ethical. Is it truly the moral thing to do to take a copy of a performer’s work for free? As I said earlier, I personally think that’s a poor way to show your appreciation. And now, I’m done threadshitting. Enjoy your music.
Dear god, that’s almost 5000 cds, you awful, awful pirate you.
Your friends clearly have too many cds and much much too much disposable income.
My ballpark guess is that you’ve got about 250GB of music right there, and approximately 90% of which you’ll listen to once or less than once. Which is a shame since I figure this must’ve taken about 500 hours of your life to accomplish, and all you’re getting in return is a message board full of people telling you what a criminal you are.
Ever heard “Everything is Free” by Gillian Welch? Beautiful song all about pirated music. I heard it on the CD I bought, thank goodness.
Everything is free now,
That’s what they say.
Everything I ever done,
Gotta give it away.
Someone hit the big score.
They figured it out,
That we’re gonna do it anyway,
Even if doesn’t pay
Jeff: You’re right, of course. Most of it I’ll probably never listen to at all, or hear a few seconds of a couple of songs and say “Next!”. That is what makes me so happy about the digital age, the ability to have a collection of music made up entirely of songs I like. It is the exceedingly rare album that is made up entirely of music I like, and I always resented the hell out of that.
A quick look tells me that two folders of a total of 43,000 songs is about 200 gigs so far. I may have a lot more than I thought… I know I have some big folders of music on two other computers.
At one point I was firing on all cylinders, I had 4 computers side by side with crates of CDs, and almost by the time I finished inserting the fourth CD, the first computer was ready for another. I actually still have a couple of unripped crates waiting for me to have a moment to finish.
