Add to the equation the sleep hours per day (and maybe work/job hours too)
If in one day (24 hrs) you spend 8 hrs sleeping and around 6 hours of work, then that means that you only have available 24-14 = 10 hours/day to be spent in this project (5/12 of a day) so adding the restant 7/12 would be:
If 5/12 is to 243, then 7/12 would be = 340.2
So 243 days of listening to Trance music + 340.2 days of sleeping/working = 583.2 days
In practice, the situation is much better than what pure math suggests for the following four points.
1. Many of the tracks on these records are not trance tracks. This can happen for three reasons.
- The vinyl is simply mislabeled on Discogs, and it doesn't feature any trance tracks.
- The vinyl features tracks that have trance elements in them (hence it earns the 'Trance' tag on Discogs), but trance is only a supplementary part to these tracks that are otherwise mainly rooted in other genres (e.g., New Beat, Techno, IDM, etc.).
- The vinyl features a track that is indeed trance, but all the other tracks on it are from other genres (e.g., Techno, Acid, etc.).
2. The actual quality of the track is not up to certain quality standards (so it's bad, or at least mediocre, bland, and forgettable).
3. The album/track in question is extremely obscure (and/or has few/bad ratings on Discogs) and is not available anywhere online, which heavily suggests it's not worthwhile / not worth listening to. Based on my currently processed data, I think around 10% of tracks pre-1993 fall into this category. And, of course, even if I would want to listen to these really obscure and potentially quite bad/forgettable tracks/albums, I don't have the desire or money to pay for all of them.
4. Some tracks are just cut-down versions/radio edits of tracks I've already listened to in full or just duplicate releases. I made this point 'strikethrough' because I already somewhat calculated this into the equation to learn how many tracks I'll need to go through (without duplicates and radio edits). It's probably around 200-250K.
These are especially common with pre-1993 records/tracks (in the proto-trance era). Now obviously, if someone knows the defining elements and boundaries of a given genre (in this case, trance), it's pretty easy to recognize even after just skipping to random points of a given track and listening to only a few seconds of it, whether it is trance or not. And if not, there's no point in listening to it. The same methodology applies to tracks that are not up to certain quality standards. There's no point in listening to a track from the start all the way to the end to realize it's bad because if you have enough knowledge/experience in the genre and/or if you just have an appropriate level of taste, you'll realize it soon anyway.
Basically, this way of listening ensures that I can go through 100 tracks comfortably a day (although if the custom script I need gets completed, I'll be able to go through 200 tracks or more easily because I no longer have to spend time comparing and writing tons of music-related data). Of course, there's a counterpoint to all of these (something that I talked about in the FAQ section of my post).
"If I have a track that manages to pique my interest, I try to acquire it as soon as possible in lossless quality to ensure that I give it ideal listening conditions. After that, I give it a few spins in order to decide whether it’s worthy of being among the best of the genre and being part of my personal collection or not. Sometimes making this decision only take a few listens, sometimes it takes ten, and sometimes it takes multiple weeks, as understanding and truly appreciating the given tune may require a lot of effort, like establishing a certain level of intellectual and emotional connection between it and the listener."
Of course, I could brute force my way through all of these tracks, but I think there's definitely a smarter and more efficient way to do this.
Edit: maybe that 200-250K assumption from myself is overly pessimistic since Discogs lists 824 12" releases between 1988 and 1991, yet there are only 677 individual (supposedly trance) tracks on those records in total, based on my database (I already went through all of them, since I'm finished with 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1991).
Although this is still a small sample, if there are 70,000 12" records in total between 1988 and 2009 on Discogs (realistically more, maybe around 90,000 with the inclusion of other trance filters, like Hard Trance, Tech Trance, and Progressive Trance), maybe I shouldn't expect 200,000 to 250,000 tracks. Only 80,000.