Box Set Go

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This is a question for those of you who buy (or yes ACQUIRE) large amounts of music at once - maybe in the form of a box set, or some kind of big "torrent", or something. I'm especially thinking of things like 4CD sets of country songs, or 8CD Disky box sets - anything with a huge number of not-known-to-you tracks.

My question is - how do you deal with them? Do you have a method for working out what the good stuff is? Do you just listen to them as you would single-artist albums? Do you find that the first five tracks get listened to more than the last five? etc etc.

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Listen to everything once through. Make mental note of awesome tracks I didn't already know (if any). Go back and listen to awesome tracks. Forget rest of boxset until approx 3 years later when scrounging round for obscurities, realise a) that inital judgement was sound and remainder of tracks are indeed un-awesome b) I now know another 50% of these non-awesome tracks through Life Experience but had no idea they were on said boxset c) it is time to BUY ANOTHER BOXSET.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what I do! Every time I try to shuffle a huge box set on an iPod or playlist I end up getting sick of the whole damn compilation because the "shuffle" feature is loaded (I try to keep a reasonably low amount of music in circulation and then change it up -- if there's a high concentration I'll never hear anything I want to hear anyway).

One sit-through is usually almost foolproof, and if I dig the whole comp, then I'll just pretend it's an album, so you get interesting favorites.