Ripped!

Well, after nearly a week of what seems like almost continuous effort, the great Music Transfer Project is finally completed! Yep, that's right, my entire CD collection is now handily contained in one compact little package. I feel... quite a sense of satisfaction, actually.

Here's a few statistics for your amusement (or, OK, my amusement):

Total number of tracks on the Karma: 3,728
Total space used: 13.0 GB

Top ten artists:
Jethro Tull: 106 tracks
Jimmy Buffett: 93 tracks
Gordon Lightfoot: 87 tracks
Rush: 83 tracks
Billy Joel: 82 tracks
Warren Zevon: 76 tracks
Space Ghost: 74 tracks
The Great Luke Ski: 72 tracks
They Might Be Giants: 72 tracks
Queen: 70 tracks

Wow, that utterly and completely surprises me. OK, the Jethro Tull is no surprise. I love that band. And I realized as I was copying discs that I had a heck of a lot of Jimmy Buffett albums. I don't know what the hell Gordon Lightfoot is doing at #3, though. I seem, somewhere, to have acquired four Gordon Lightfoot discs, with about 20-25 songs each. I don't know where. I don't know why. Rush and Billy Joel are no surprise, though I would have almost expected Rush to rank a little higher. Warren Zevon doesn't surprise me either, if I stop to think about it. The next two are deeply startling, but they really only make the top ten because they're comedy discs with zillions of very short little tracks. The presence of They Might Be Giants is largely due to Dial-A-Song, which also has a ton of very short tracks. The Queen is mostly due to the fact that I have about four different Greatest Hits albums for them, though they would have ranked even higher if the disc of Queen songs being played by the London Symphony Orchestra was listed under Queen instead of under the orchestra's name. I'm disappointed that Pink Floyd didn't make the cut, though.

It should also be noted that a single song is counted more than once if it appears on more than one album (which happens a lot if you've got Greatest Hits discs).

Top ten genres:
General Rock: 634
General Soundtrack: 289
Soft Rock: 243
Classic Rock: 226
Folk-Rock: 209
Progressive Rock: 188
Television Soundtrack: 168
Irish Celtic: 145
General Folk: 123
Hard Rock: 121

Mind you, those genre labels really don't mean much of anything at all. They come from some database or other, somewhere on the net, and there doesn't seem to be any consistency in how they're assigned, with one disc by a particular artist being placed in one category, while another of the exact same type of music may well be called something different. Not to mention that the subdivisions are ridiculously specific. I mean... Power Pop? Post-Punk? Bachelor Pad? Excuse me?

If I ever get really ambitious, I might go through and re-label everything with genre designations that are actually useful. But I don't know if I'll ever actually bother. It's not like I'm inclined to want to select songs by genre, anyway. I don't find genre labels all that useful even when they are assigned in some vaguely sensible way.