An experiment of sorts

The other night I was listening to some music (what else is new?) and I caught myself letting out a bored sigh. I have a bad habit of spending 80% of my listening time listening to the last 10 or 15 albums I acquired over and over and eventually getting a bit bored of them, and that was exactly what had happened again. I then thought to myself, I wish I could just throw all of my music into a pile and randomly select something to listen to, and of course within .00005 seconds I slapped myself on the forehead for being such an idiot and simultaneously praised the digital age because, of course, I could very easily do just that by throwing all of my mp3s on a single playlist and hitting random. I've done this time and time again over the years but somehow the idea of it had slipped from my mind. So I did just that and in doing so, I came up with a few somewhat interesting facts about my music collection (at least the digital version) and came up with an idea. The facts are fairly straightforward, I have just shy of 15,000 mp3s on my computer and if I were to play them all back to back without skipping a track or stopping it at any point I could play music nonstop for about 40 days. I'm sure there are people out there who have my collection trumped several times over, but that 40 days thing got me thinking. What would happen if I did just that? What if I started at song one (which happens to be Queens of the Stone Age's "Who'll Be The Next In Line" from a compilation I downloaded some time ago called Stone Age Complication) and let it play all the way through until the last song, in order? Amazingly my computer decided that Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers' "The Waiting" would fall into the last slot, sometimes the fates conspire to do some cool shit. I listen to music constantly, so having music playing all the time would be nothing new, but having no control over what is playing would be kind of nuts. Regardless, I've decided to engage in this little experiment, but before I begin I will lay out my ground rules.

1) Once I hit play I can not hit the Stop or Skip button until every song has been played.
1a) The only exceptions to this rule are if the power goes out, my music player software freezes, or I have to restart my computer for some insanely urgent reason.
2) I can never turn the volume on my computer all the way off.
2a) I can turn the volume down, but the music must always be audible.
3) I can listen to whatever music I want on my Ipod or while in the car. (I'm not going to go nuts and disallow myself from listening to new music by only allowing myself to listen to whats currently playing on my computer at the time.)
4) I will not add any new music I acquire between now and the end of this experiment to the playlist. Only the music I have in digital format as of my typing this counts.

So that's it. I'll update my progress periodically here on the site. Should be interesting as I still have loads of music on here that I am not too into anymore and those times will be rough. I should also note that I spend quite a bit (read: way way way too much) of my time sitting in front of my computer, so this is going to be equal parts awesome and terrible. I'm going to use my Audioscrobbler page as a sort of living document of what is playing on my computer whenever I'm at work or anywhere other than in front of my computer. It will also allow me to see exactly where the music stopped if my computer freezes or restarts or whatever. Feel free to follow along with me. Alright, here I go. This should be interesting...