With all the talk about New Paradigms that's been going around since the 2010 Federal election, you might suspect that Hughesy's doing a bit of bandwagon jumping here, but really it's a fairly natural evolution from the Great Computer Crash in early 2008 that I've referred to elsewhere. While the crash didn't wipe out the iTunes music library it did manage to hijack all the related metadata, leaving me with somewhere in the vicinity of thirty-five thousand tracks that allegedly hadn't been played. They had been, of course, but the crash meant playlists and that sort of thing needed to be rebuilt from scratch.
At the same time it was obvious thirty-five thousand tracks didn't leave a lot of hard disk space for other stuff, so something had to give. The something has been, over the course of eighteen months, about eight thousand tracks. Actually, it's more than that because there's been plenty of new music going in while some of the contents have been selectively culled. How many more is something I can't calculate, but regardless of the relevant gross figures that's a net gain of a fair bit of hard drive space.
It's also effectively the end of the Paradigm Before Last, the convictionyou could take your entire music collection and have more or less instantaneous access to everything through your iTunes library. Actually, with 27097 items taking up 148.79 GB of disk space as I type, it would’ve been the Paradigm Before Its Time had I been able to buy a machine with a drive larger than 250 GB.
Since the base line 27 inch iMac now comes with a standard terabyte of drive space and $210 allows you to double that, I could go up to ten times the current track count and still have a quarter of my drive space (and double the current machine's capacity) for non-musical content.
We won't, however, be going down that road because the thought of losing the metadata under those circumstances would induce a gross fit of the screaming abdabs. No, we're not going to have everything on the drive at our notional fingertips. Between now and the time when the current machine decides to turn up its digital toes I'll be trying to maintain things around the twenty-seven thousand mark.