Don't Mess With My Music

I love music. While my science-loving, left-sided brain dominates a lot of what I love to do and my overall temperament, there are still artistic, musical, right-brained clusters of neurons that permeate many of my activities. I enjoy having music around for most of my waking hours; in the car, on the computer, as I play with the children I work with... I have quite a bit of fun still making mix CDs for my car. I get so much satisfaction ordering the music in just that perfect way. ...And over time, the music forms associations depending on where it's heard. There are certain songs that will induce in me a strong craving to go camping. Or to drive to Seattle. Or to relive some of my university years.

I have to admit, though--although I love music, I'm not as current in the music scene as you'd think I would be. I don't actually listen to the radio a whole lot, and even less to the most mainstream of stations. The stuff I like, I generally either find by accident (i.e. I hear something on someone else's stereo that I find kind of catchy), or seek out for a specific reason (i.e. a friend recommended it, or it's from Grey's). I only really know a handful of artists across musical genres.

Regardless, I love music. And because I love music, I love iTunes. Along with Photoshop, it is probably one of the best-loved programs on my laptop--which I also love. I've had my laptop for four years, and while I'm not on the newest-of-the-new operating systems, my XP is not entirely obsolete, and my laptop holds up well. But occasionally it has issues shutting down. So when it was doing that the other day, I manually forced it to shut down with the power button. Which I've done several times before in moments of impatience, without consequence. Not so much the other day.

The next time I started my computer after that, I noticed my internet settings had been reset. Fair enough. Whatever, I thought. Then I opened up my iTunes. It, too, had been reset. My over-1200 songs and nine customized playlists were gone. "Oh, crap." My brain started racing. The music can't be GONE-gone, I thought. I forced myself to think, enlisting Google to help remind me of technological details I was having trouble remembering in-the-moment as my brain was trying to solve the issue and keep from freaking out at the same time. The iTunes folder. Right! It's where iTunes automatically organizes song files when imported or downloaded from the iTunes store. Most of my music was there. The rest was in My Music folder. It took over an hour, but eventually, I had virtually all my music back in my iTunes library. I even put music back into the simpler of my customized playlists. It was midnight by this time, however, and I made it part of the plan to deal with the more complex of playlists the next day. I went to bed with a sense of satisfaction at how resourceful I'd been in solving the issue.

My mom (who stayed with me the past few days) went on the computer early in the morning when she was up, however, and it asked her about a "disk cleanup". It must have done a heavy duty clean up, cuz when I went into my programs, the internet and iTunes had been reset again! I was not impressed. I called Tech Support at Apple to see if I should just uninstall and reinstall iTunes at this point (yes), and got e-mailed details to uninstall all of iTunes' various components in proper order. I ran another disk clean-up. Then I de-fragged the C:\ drive outright. Then I uninstalled iTunes and its friends (QuickTime, etc.). I emptied the recycle bin for good measure. And finally, downloaded and reinstalled iTunes.

I added ONE song into my music library. Then I shut down the computer and started it up again. I wasn't about to go through the process of re-loading over 1200 songs again until I knew that there were no more issues. Upon restart, the one song was still there (and my internet started where it was supposed to start). Halle-ja-loo-yah!

So for a second time, I re-loaded all 1200 songs (distributed across 4-5 main folders). And we are now good. I still have a playlist that needs to be ordered properly, and my larger playlists may not have all the songs that they originally had (I can only cross-reference so much with what's on my iPod, cuz I haven't up-synced the iPod in a while). But I'm pretty much there.

I love my music. Most of the music in my iTunes is on CD, many of which live in my car. But aside from the hassle it would have been to have to reload that way, it's nice to have all my music in one location to just listen to whatever I want, however I want, with one click.

I worked hard to build a library of music I love... don't take that away from me!