Only a little arm-twisting and I got The Cable Guy to write about the evolution of stored music. I was inspired by the sight of boxes and boxes of CD’s now stored in a corner of our bedroom, compared to a “party favor” we handed out this summer — a small flash drive with hours and hours of music.

Here’s The Cable Guy, in his own words:

I got my first stored music in my life when, as a child, I listened to 78 RPM shellac records. A 12-inch record side could hold around 5 minutes. When I was a teenager, records came as 33 1/3 LPs and could hold around 22 minutes/side. When 1982 came around, the Compact Disc could hold around 75 minutes.

As can be noted, as time passed, the volume of space needed to store music declined significantly. The birth of the CD brought music into the era when it could be stored in digital form.  The personal computer could now be used to supply audio signals to a sound reproduction system which had no moving parts to wear out.  Each replaying of the stored music was as good as the last.

Along with the technological progress in computers, storage of digital data became more reliable, needed less space and had larger storage capacity.

WHAT I DID WITH MY MUSIC STORAGE LATELY

In the last year or so, I converted all my analog music sources to digital files. These included records, tapes and CD’s.
As a summary of this activity, all of the CD’s in my collection were converted to .mp3 files by using the Apple iTunes software program.

The 6 boxes shown contain about 750 CDs:

A view of the inside of one of the boxes:

The conversion of about 200 Clssical CDs to .mp3 files resulted in 53GB of digital data.  This amount of music can fit into the USB flash drive shown on the left side of the image below.
My entire 700 CD collection has 122GB of digital data and can fit into the USB flash drive shown in the middle.
The 2 1/4 inch SSD shown can hold almost 1000GB of digital data.

To provide a perspective of the volume of space that has changed over my lifetime, consider the time on the side of a LP record (22 minutes/side) compared to the 10 hours that the 64GB flash drive can hold.