The Celestial Jukebox (a term I first heard from Lucas Gonze) is, well, all music that has been recorded, and is listed in the freedb (gotta start somewhere). Says Lucas:

How big is the celestial jukebox? Freedb.org has 912,519 album listings. Each of these represents a 600MB cd, and a 600MB cd can be losslessly compressed to 300MB.

912,519 * 300MB = 273,755,700MB

There are 10,48,576 megabytes in a terabyte.

273,755,700MB / 10,48,576 (MB per terabyte) = 261 TB.

A local cache of the celestial jukebox would be in the neighborhood of 261 terabytes.

Enter how many megabytes of mp3s that you have on your harddrive:

Press button to find out how much of the Celestial Jukebox you possess:

Result:

OR

Enter how many gigabytes of mp3s that you have on your harddrive:

Press button to find out how much of the Celestial Jukebox you possess:

Result:

12:37 PM 3/31/2003: Update

Lucas say:
technical correction: the 261 TB figure applies to lossless compression. Most people have lossy MP3s. Lossy MP3s are about an order of magnitude smaller, somewhere vaguely approximately sloppily in the neighborhood of 26.1TB.

Okay - so let's try it again.

Enter how many megabytes of mp3s that you have on your harddrive:

Press button to find out how much of the Celestial Jukebox you possess:

Result:

OR

Enter how many gigabytes of mp3s that you have on your harddrive:

Press button to find out how much of the Celestial Jukebox you possess:

Result:

BY FILE

How this works:

  • There are 912,519 albums listed in the freedb. Let's assume (and it is indeed an assumption that makes an ass out of you and me) that an album has an average of 10 tracks. That means that there are 9,125,190 songs in the freedb.
    Enter how many mp3s (that is, number of files) that you have on your harddrive:

    Press button to find out how much of the Celestial Jukebox you possess:

    Result: