(These are just some random thoughts I wanted to get in one place).

I’m really an all-or-nothing person when it comes to music. I bought one of the first mega-multi-disc changers back in 95(?) and since then have been completely unwilling to change compact discs (I *hate* butterfly packages — so un-butterfly-like, as butterflies are a good thing and not in the least annoying. Anyway).

I never had a CD-changer in my car, because I hated the idea that the CDs I wanted in the car at any given moment would be in the house or vice versa. My solution there was an in-dash minidisc player and mix MDs. “Mixes” fall outside the “all-or-nothing” realm because they’re intentional and have “flow.”

For me, the decision to “go digital” was spurred on by three things:

1. the fact that my collection had grown far beyond the two daisy-chained 200-disc changers, which meant there was a lot of my music I wasn’t hearing (except for the “select” songs that made it onto mixes)
2. the invention of the Audiotron (that lets me stream all my music from a PC, in my case a dedicated music server) , and
3. the 40GB iPod, which was big enough to “hold it all” … the same logic (or lack thereof) about the CD player in the car applied here: “What if the music I want to hear is not on the iPod?!”

So now I have a 40GB iPod — that really holds 37 GB; thankfully, about 15GB of my collection is classical (which is “bigger” in filesize), new age or jazz, which I’m not as concerned with having with me. (FWIW, I have a little less than 9000 songs).

All my “real music” (which roughly equates to stuff I can sing to) is in my baby (at about 35GB), which makes me *very* happy! There are a lot of duplicate songs (the cases where I have a “best of” album as well as the original disc, for example), which I’m weeding out as time permits, allowing me to add more music (plus I have a GB or two to spare now).

I don’t think I’d want only part of my music with me. I did buy a Sonic Rio an eon or two ago, and almost never used it because trying to figure out *which* songs I wanted (and get them onto the bugger) was such a pain. I’m way too picky about what I want to hear… sometimes it’s not enough to be in the right genre or even the right artist; no, I want *the*song*that*the*radio*in*my*head*is*playing.”

Did y’all know that not everyone has a radio in his head? I can’t imagine that.