We tend to listen to satellite radio at home. I have an iPod deck at work and switch between random playlists and artists and specific CDs, because I'm changeable like that.

I wish I could listen to music more at work but my brain won't let me. I get most of my new music these days from music club hosted at my friends' bookstore. I feel bad i have nothing much to offer but, dag, I've learned a ton!

I get most of my new music by going through music blogs that focus on particular era or genres.

I get most of my new music by going through music blogs that focus on particular era or genres.

Could you post some of these? (Maybe in the music thread.)

OMFG, people, if you want to make plans with me, answer my texts or my emails.

I get most of my new music from the radio (regular and Pandora), concerts, and friends posting mp3's. Sometimes I discover new songs/bands poking around on YouTube, too. And I buy used CDs at thrift stores and Half-Price Books.

I used to do a lot of satellite radio too, but both our units broke and we couldn't be arsed to replace them, so we canceled instead.

I do have a lot of storage space both exposed as bookshelf space and hidden as cabinet space currently taken up by cds in cases. And the big problem with doing things my way is the current state of DRM. Like I have all these files sitting on my hard drive that were authorized under Napster, and, oddly, ran for a while under Rhapsody, but now are no good. And Rhapsody, when it nixed all those, also nixed everything else I had imported, which included files I had ripped from CD, but stupidly, had ripped to WMA.

So with the new laptop I'll have a chance to sort out all my DRM. I wish I could just transfer the files authorized under Rhapsody from one machine to the next, but I bet I'll have to redownload those, which means next time I'm in a hotel, because of my bandwidth limitations. But it'll give me a chance to start clean, and I'll probably start reripping all my physical CD's, so I can store those away. Maybe in the attic, but probably not because of heat issues.

Then I have a lot of storage space for old VHS tapes, DVDs. I expect I will start building a Blu-ray collection now. So I would like to rip and store those digitally as well. Initially I was burning everything to DVD, which I could store on a spindle. But at this point, I dunno if that's even the best use of my space.

What do you guys do for digital storage of video? Do you just rip and keep it on a hard drive?

What do you guys do for digital storage of video? Do you just rip and keep it on a hard drive?

All my digital video I purchased from iTunes.

Time Machine automatic backups are a godsend.

I buy albums for classical music when I want a specific recording, which iTunes is particularly bad for. Also, for opera I want the actual CD so I also get the libretto.

It never occurred to me to rate a song in iTunes! Why would I?

I don't rate or use shuffle, I just make lots of playlists.

What I really want is the ability to tailor the genre categories. And no, I don't want to just add new ones, I want to delete the crappy ones that are automatically there.

I'm fairly obsessive about collecting music. If I like something, I need to own it in some form. Thankfully, I have gotten better about being a completist, but I still have some of that tendancy. I have two big industrial storage shelves of vinyl (some of which I probably haven't listened to in a decade). At some point in the last decade, I'm pretty sure my CDs started outnumbering the vinyl, though I haven't done an inventory in at least that long (I'm really overdue). The total combined is probably up near 3K at this point (last inventory totaled at 1900+).

I'm nearly as bad with DVDs which between movies and box sets of series is approaching the 1000 mark.

I won't even venture to estimate on books/comics.