Deleted 12,000+ Digital Files

It was the start of the big decline for the music industry. I avoided Sony music for nearly a year because of that malware.

 

Digital hoarding is still hoarding

 

You recently had a basement?

 

No one's ever died of suffocation because they became buried in digital files.

 

mental issues don't require physical items

 

Yeah my NAS is getting too heavy from all the files so I think I may need to nuke it...

 

You know people who are clinically insane because of their collection of digital files? Or is this speculation?

 

If you can't physically touch it, you don't want it? We don't physically touch the actual music (and of course the music touches us). Yet I have the same materialistic need. I think it's a fault of us who grew up in the original LP era that we can't let go of the hard stuff. I also have thousands of lps and CDs but still keep my collection on hard drive - with onsite and offsite backups - 'cause I like to be my own dj and make playlists on the fly.

 

Someone actually went through the effort of searching for this thread with the intention of bumping it.

 

It is true that there exist a host of mental issues that are not related to ownership of physical goods. But the idea of a hoarder of music in hard copy formats - that take up a significant portion of living space - purging the physical formats for a digital hard drive and/or cloud source that provides the same musical content sounds like a major win for at least that particular issue.

 

I found that backing up to Google Play actually converted my ALAC lossless back to smaller mp3 files.

Weirdly, I never thought of simply copying them to a cloud drive. I just knew I wanted some kind of backup.

I have a external USB I backup the lossless files to. One day I'll research some kind of server to stream them but I soldier on with an old Mac pro.

I'm not getting rid of any physical media though as I love handling it and reading the liner notes. I also have multiple copies of some things But my wife would love it if I got rid of the physical items. I will not give in!

 

More likely the other way around - the excessive collection of digital files is a manifestation of the pre-existing mental illness, rather than the cause of it.

 

Examples?

Sorry, I can't get on board with this idea that having a lot of digital files is equivalent to being a hoarder. Unless you've got stacks of external hard drives filling every room.

 

Personally, i love the idea of having all of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour or Tom Petty's Buried Treasure or my whole music collection on one or a few thumb drives, and listening to them in the car on a long drive. I find that one of the cool things of the modern age. Of course I could carry along a box of CDs and listen that way too, but the tiny thumb drive is so much more convenient.

 

This is what I do. My digital library is cloned to a portable hard drive that I keep offsite.

 

You are focussing on the problem with hoarding being the physical space it takes up, which is certainly an annoying consequence of hoarding but the really destructive part of the illness is the perpetual feeding of the need (possibly insecurity) which led to the illness, whether done digitally or physically. Like any form of addiction, the cycle of dependency needs to be broken not fed.

 

You still haven't shown me any examples of this apparent problem of digital hoarding. Where are these people whose lives are being impacted by digital hoarding? If they deleted it all and went back to CDs, would that solve the problem?

 

No, the problem would still be the acquiring, accumulating, collecting, hoarding to satisfy a psychological need (like a junkie getting a fix) whatever the musical format.

I don't know how else to explain this - it would be the same if the hoarding/collecting involved handbags, pens or anything else - it is the continuous satisfying of the need that is the problem, not the actual stuff that you end up with. The reason for the need has to be identified and tackled rather than just deleting digital files and substituting them for something else that perpetuates the mental illness.

 

I'm with you. My physical discs are numerous, and not particularly well-organized. I ripped the vast majority of my collection to FLAC over the past several years, there's no way I can piss all of that away. Having everything available at the click of a mouse button in foobar is something I couldn't do without anymore.

Kudos to the OP for having the guts to do it though, if that's what floats your boat. I just hope you don't have second thoughts down the road.

 

I still think this is a speculative, academic argument and that there are really not that many people plagued by digital hoarding.

This thread is about one person gleefully deleting all his digital files to return exclusively to physical media and there are many people applauding this and many others saying it makes little sense, but I don't see how a counter scenario of "digital hoarding" enters into it at all. Are people advocating digital media somehow enabling hoarding? If you have no physical media and a Tidal subscription, are you still hoarding?

 

I have music on

LP
CD
cassettes (still - I get a kick out of listening to what I have previously put on mixed tapes)
phone/mp3 player
computer

They all work for me. What would not work is having my music reside somewhere else, like in the cloud/with a service or something like that. Because whether one agrees or not:

If you can't hold it, you don't own it. I believe that.

 

Yes, but all my hoarding is limited to a one-pound external hard drive on my desk.

 

Probably not, but possibly yes in some cases - it all depends on the motivation behind the collecting/hoarding. Two people can have the same number of albums (in whatever format) but one is motivated in a healthy way by musical enjoyment, while the other is motivated by a compulsive need borne of a mental illness.

 

I have about 10,000 mp3s that I don't even think about anymore. I wish I had those hundreds of hours back I wasted tweaking them, organizing them, cleaning up metadata, etc. What a pain in the butt. Meanwhile, I listen to about 6 CDs a day. What a great format.

 

Yeah, but if you have an unhealthy codependent relationship with that one-pound brick on your desk, you need help. Don't think you're better than the guy with forty years of newspapers stacked around the house.