If you say "everybody" - sure. I would suspect that some people with enormous collections fall into the category "hunter and gatherer" who download everything they can lay their hands on, with the goal of creating a large collection, not listening to music.
But one CD ripped in ALAC is probably around 300-350 MB, so 1 TB is about 3,000 CDs in ALAC. Buying 2 CDs a week for 30 years gets you there. Easier if you are into classical music. Just checked on Amazon and found:
Bach complete, 157 CDs, £90.
Mozart complete, 170 CDs, £120.
Haydn almost complete, 150 CDs, £180.
Beethoven complete, 85 CDs, £70
and so on. That small list alone is about 550 CDs, about 200 GB in ALAC.
I'd rather buy a house.My brother has over 175,000 songs which is over a year. I forget the Gb amount but he is insane with the id3 tags..all complete withcorrect album art (jpeg even to save space) duplicates only when "original album" + "greatest hits"...best part ALL LEGAL! Damn itunes stole my brother!
All right, who has the largest iTunes library?
I currently have 372GB...
Habitus
117309 songs - 386.7 Days - 937.29GB
I had a library of around 450gig. Got a new Mac the other day and decided to store it all externally. After the transfer I now, for some reason, have about 75% of my library duplicated and it's eaten up 700gig. That's not even including all my films, as I couldn't be bothered converting everything to iTunes recognised formats. Sorting this out is going to be a nightmare. Maybe I'll just use Spotify?
Have you thought about buying iTunes Match, then letting it do its thing for a day, then a couple days later downloading all the higher bit rated stuff to your new Mac?
I would delete the folder that has all the duplicates, and use iTunes Match instead personally. Plus, if you have a laptop like me with a smaller HD, then you can delete everything off of it, and just stream your library.
I'm surprised this thread is still running with such paltry numbers. gb? Ha! If you're not in the tb range, you're not in the game. Approximately 3.1tb of music in iTunes, not including a few hundred gbs in FLACs, and a couple of tb in movies that I watch in VLC (does iTunes support 1080 yet?).
And yes I listen to lots of music of all sorts of genres, generally in shuffle, though the algorithm in iTunes is beginning to annoy me, it does tend to repeat patterns and will get stuck on a particular song if I have multiple versions by the same and other artists.
46 million songs? I call bs. Screenshot or it didn't happen.
I don't think they do test it - the market is probably too limited. It's always been a dog for large libraries, although way better in the last few versions than iTunes 5-6 that crawled with 40k+ songs.One thing I'm curious about: The developers at Apple should have some insane amount of songs to be able to test iTunes with it. Just so that they can test what happens if you open a library with 100,000 songs, and if it all works without crashing.