Jason Stringer

I bought Kerry a brand new whiz-bang video iPod for her birthday.  It finally arrived over the weekend and we plugged it in.  We’ve owned an iPod before so we knew what were doing.  No dramas.  Now, iPod’s require the music software iTunes to transfer music from your PC to the iPod.  When we re-installed iTunes again (for the first time in over a year) it had remembered all our old playlists and file locations.  Pretty cool in some circumstances but it was no good to us at this time because we had rearranged our mp3’s on our local HDD – renamed them properly and put them in folders.  So I told iTunes to remove the current library so we could tell it where the new and renamed mp3’s were.  It did this… and in a second flat, I knew, it had removed every fucking mp3 from my PC.  Six years of collecting music – over 30GB.  Gone.  I spent hours trying recover them, but to no avail.

Some might call it justice for all the music downloading I do (granted, I DO download a lot of music), but the majority of my collection was legally ripped from CD’s I already own.  Now it’s a matter of going back to square one, dusting off all the CD’s and ripping them again.  Kerry has taken that job by the horns and is conquering it quick-smart.

It was a strange feeling to see all those files just VANISH.  I was gutted.  So was Kerry.  Really, really emotionally pissed that iTunes could just remove our files like that, because of one simple click of a button.

Strange how we become so desperately attached and reliant to something as material as an mp3 collection that we feel heartbroken when it is gone.

Needless to say, I have third party software for the iPod now, and I will never be using iTunes ever again.  Ever.  Fuck ‘em.