These days, of course, you add your material to your player of choice and let 'er rip.
Theoretically, you can go for twenty-four hours in shuffle mode without needing to change a thing, which brings the subject of organizing your music library into play.
Anybody who's visited the Little House of Concrete will be only too aware of the quantity of music on the shelves, and it probably comes as no surprise to learn that much of it has found its way onto the hard drive of the desktop computer, with selected subsets on the iPod and the iPad.
As far back as early 2008 I had around thirty-five thousand tracks on the hard drive of the old machine, and had actually heard them all at least once.
Then came the Great Computer Crash which didn't wipe out the whole library but did take out the associated metadata, which meant that the whole thirty-five thousand tracks (allegedly) hadn't been played.
The experience suggested thirty-five thousand tracks was just a tad excessive, and that the library needed to be substantially reduced, so over the next eighteen months some severe culling chopped it back by around eight thousand tracks.
But those tracks needed to be heard and sorted while the culling proceeded, which was, as you may have gathered, a major undertaking.
So how did we manage it?