Strategies for Music Hoarding

So I'm trying to rebuild my fried digital collection in an over zealous fashion yet allow more than a trickle of bandwidth for my house mates to at least check the weather now and then. My strategy so far has been to use downthemall and just make a huge queue and set a limit of one download at a time. While this seems to leave some bandwidth, I would like a way to set a kb/sec limit (100 or 200 maybe) and as far as I can tell downthemall doesn't offer that. I imagine this is a simple function as I have seen it in every bittorrent or p2p program I've used. Am I overlooking this feature in downthemall? Is there a better program for managing downloads? Is there another way to throttle? Or is my entire strategy vastly inferior to your own?

PS...I use firefox on xp.

if you're using a router (wired or wireless) there might be QoS settings which you can use to selectively limit your downloads

don't download more music than you can listen to

You could join one of the boot trader sites and do CDR snail mail trades of old tapes. Rip them to your hard drive and then have the best of both worlds.

also, do you have the newest version of downthemall? I think it just updated recently. Make sure you don't accidently download all the non music files on each web page.

don't download more music than you can listen to

― BlaptainYourass (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, March 30, 2010 8:08 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

disregard this suggestion imo

agreein w/ samosa

i like to call it "preparing for the next time i'm stoned and at my computer in the middle of the night"

Don't download more music than you can listen to sounds vaguely like reasonable advice, and honestly I won't thoroughly listen to much of what I download. I can't help it I'm obsessed and insatiable, but I imagine none of you can relate to that. You guys just wouldn't understand.

Now I feel a pang of guilt that can only be tempered by a 48 hour Soukous binge.

it is good advice and people in the OMG I HAVE 30 PICABYTES OF SONGS culture forget it.

if you spend more time searching and downloading and tagging than actually LISTENING, then you're more a hoarder than a hearer.

Approach everything on an album by album basis and you'll appreciate every album in your digital collection so much more.

if you're using a router (wired or wireless) there might be QoS settings which you can use to selectively limit your downloads

― ain't no thang but a chicken ㅋ (dyao), Wednesday, March 31, 2010 12:07 AM (29 minutes ago)

Thanks for the suggestion I will keep that in mind as a possible solution. Unfortunately I don't know much about computers how they work, where they come from, or why. A few years ago my efforts at port-forwarding rendered our internet unusable for for several days. Surely there's a simpler way or at least one that I can wrap my head around.

what kind of router do you have? if you have a linksys you can replace the firmware with aftermarket firmware which will have QoS built in.

http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato

it is good advice and people in the OMG I HAVE 30 PICABYTES OF SONGS culture forget it.

if you spend more time searching and downloading and tagging than actually LISTENING, then you're more a hoarder than a hearer.

Approach everything on an album by album basis and you'll appreciate every album in your digital collection so much more.

― rolling twitter pric (Whiney G. Weingarten), Wednesday, March 31, 2010 12:40 AM (8 minutes ago)

I agree with this point entirely. I must say though despite the frantic pace of my music explorations, I still get stuck on albums like when I was younger and had less listening options. I can't tell you how many times I've listened to Colette Magny's Feu Et Rythme in the last year for instance.

sez the dude who listened to 1000 albums last year.

it's obviously more important to listen than to acquire, but there is something about having a bunch of shit you've never heard on your computer waiting to be broken in that's nice sometimes. despite the fact that it makes us look like greedy assholes who don't know the hardwon value of a piece of music, i don't see why people shouldn't hoard, so long as they spend a satisfying amount of time actually listening.

sez the dude who listened to 1000 albums last year.

uh, exactly. it fucking sucked

i've one hundred percent found it more illuminating (for example) to listen to 5 Zappa records two times each times than to have 80 Zappa records Carcass records sitting in various states of disuse on my harddrive. All those records just becomes piles of names and shit gets lost.

haha, ok point taken

I totally have Whiney's back here.

whiney otm