§ Hard drive failure is good?
You’re probably thinking I’m on crack.
How about a little back-story. I recently had a near catastrophic hard drive failure on the drive that housed all my music. I feared the worst for a while but after a stroke of luck I was able to recover most of the drive. I don’t think I lost much and its much better than spending a few weeks re-ripping everything.
That’s not the good part yet
It has taken a while to get the collection back on track and useable. It certainly is slow going – it took 3 hours just to reimport all the song files back into iTunes (17,000+ tracks plus some music videos and a ton of podcasts). Now that I’ve got the bulk of the music accessible I have to start going through it again to redo the song ratings since those are stored by iTunes and not in the song file. Ratings is what I like to base a lot of playlists on. ie: “punk + rating of 3 or more”. This makes it easy to quickly grab what I’m in the mood for a put it on the iPod.
Now this is the good part
Having to go back through all the songs and rate them again is exposing me to songs that I haven’t really thought about in years. For some of them its like listening to them for the first time again. This really is fabulous. My suggestion to you is that if you’re feeling bored with your music, it happens to me sometimes, go back and find some of that stuff that you haven’t listened to in years and it’ll blow your mind. I feel like a kid at christmas time…
Tagged as: fail hard drive itunes music
