I'm surprised nobody else has said they just keep all their music in one massive playlist on random. Am I the only person that does it?

And out of interest, how large are the collections people are working with? I'm working with about 26K of songs lasting 12 Weeks in total, so I find that leaving it on random forever is the best way to ensure everything gets an equal listen over time.

I do that when I can't decide what to listen to, but generally I listen to specific albums. I have 21,313 songs, 60.7 days worth of music.

I'd just delete some of it to be honest. I used to have a ridiculous amount of music. Not sure the exact numbers as it was years ago, but it was right around the time I first started using torrents. So I just downloaded the discography of basically every band I had heard of. Then sometimes I'd feel guilty about not listening to some of the stuff I downloaded. Like you, I started listening to the same stuff 90% of the time. Eventually I just deleted a bunch of it... cause really I was never gonna listen to it more than once anyways. Most the time I listen to music I wanna hear a specific artist or song or type of music. I'm not really a person who sits there and just lets songs songs randomly play.

Shuffle is pointless with such a large collection. If I'm in the mood for trip hop, I don't want Built to Spill popping up in the middle. I do shuffle within genres (I use a two-level genre system) which alleviates that problem, but it's still not a good way to "get in touch" with my collection.

I am going to commit to listening to and rating at least two albums each day, chosen from the genre of music I am in the mood to hear at that moment, with strong preference for stuff I'm not already familiar with. It's a start :)

In the meantime, I've already grabbed 4 new albums today, and I'm still at work!

Sometimes I just use shuffle as a jumping off point when I'm not sure what I'm in the mood for. If it lands on something I don't feel like listening to I just skip, skip, skip until something strikes me. A lot of times this leads to me just listening to the whole album of the songs I skipped to.

I do! Most people on here prefer listening to full albums. I guess we be in the minority.

The difference being I love discographies.

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Listening to: RushEsque Complete RSE [foobar2000 v1.0.3]

Yeah, I guess we're kind of opposites in that regard.

I get too overwhelmed if I download a whole discography in one go. I do shuffle on occasion, though. In fact, this thread just inspired me to shuffle right this very moment...

Yeah my need to grab discographies is definitely a bad thing. I've tried to stop, but I can't just grab one album I enjoy while knowing there are others out there by the same band that I would probably also enjoy!

I did delete one discography last night, so that's a start. It was Delerium. I had Karma many years ago and I remembered liking it, so I grabbed the lot. That was maybe a month ago. I finally sat down to give it a listen, and was not amused. So I did what I never do, and hit DEL. *shudder*