I'm a big fan of putting things off. Saving for a house? I'll do it next year. Cleaning the bathroom? I'm pretty sure I'll get round to hiring a cleaner first. Backing up my computer? Yeah. No. I haven't really done that. Despite getting some great advice from Kimberly, right here on Shiny Shiny. And making sure that I have all the music from my iPod on one hard drive? Nah. I'll do it next week.
And then the unthinkable happened. After sunning myself in Marbella finding out about the latest Philips products, I got a plane back and left my iPod in the seat in front.
To give you an idea of what this means to me, let me map out my day to you. I wake up. To my iPod. Then I have a shower. And I dock my iPod in my bathroom speakers, listening to a bit of Frank Sinatra as I scrub. Then I get dressed, whilst listening to my 'Running' soundtrack (it's used a lot more for waking up than it is for actual exercise. In fact, I'd say almost exclusively so). Then I get on the tube, listening to the latest Russell Brand podcast, ignoring all sounds of outside life thanks to my noise cancelling headphones. On arrival at work, I thank god that I'm the first in, since it means I can have first dibs on the speakers and play my music, rather than a never ending selection of crap other people come up with. At the end of the day, I commute back, and then fall asleep to the dulcet tones of Pete Doherty courtesy of the sleep function on my alarm dock. All told, we're looking at about 12 hours of music per day.
And whilst not having a need for 80GB of storage, my 5,000ish songs were perfectly selected and painstakingly chosen. The one problem? They were sourced from friend's hard drives, old computers I used to own, and slightly less than legal sources (I don't do that anymore, by the way). Only about 2,000 of them ever made it onto the PC I currently own.
The masterplan was to take all my songs off my iPod using a freeware program, and dump them all on an external hard drive, out of harms way. I'd got pretty far as well; checking prices of hard drives on eBay. But did I bite the bullet and see the process through? No. Like my brief spell as a seamstress, my undying love for roller skating, which lasted until the first time I fell over, and my hamster, I never quite got round to committing the time.
Now, I am learning to listen to the outside world. And let me tell you, it sucks. So much so, that I'm thinking of wearing my noise cancelling headphones without an MP3 player, just to dull the roar of people telling me to Mind the Gap. It's a complete assault on the senses, and I feel a bit like Crocodile Dundee coming to New York for the first time. Everything is so *noisy*. Everything is so *fast*. Everyone is so *annoying*. So, if you see a girl, wandering round Central London looking like she might cry, do her a favour, and shove a fiver in her hand for the Reclaim the Music fund.
Susi Weaser is editor of Shiny Shiny, and is now going off to have a bit of a cry.
WOW! That sucks. Sorry you lost your iPod. But sometimes without tuning out the world, you’ll hear something cool. I was on the metro the other day and forgot my iPod at home. A few stops after I got on, these 3 kids got on and rapped. It was actually pretty cool and if I had my iPod I would have no idea it was even happening.
Losing all that music is no fun at all, and I really do sympathise. If you're trying to rebuild your collection and are still hankering after the dulcet tones of Mr Doherty for night time soothingness, you can freely and legally download some new acoustic demos from his official site, French Dog Blues. They're called Stookie + Jim, and there's a link at the top right of the main page there.
Hopefully that'll make things a little less painful for you.
Sorry to hear it. Although, I'm curious as to how you were able to survive before iPods came out. Must have been REALLY tough.
Hi guys.
I spent numerous hours testing and comparing iPod backup softwares, free or not. I can tell you that the only one that does it decently is CopyPod. It’s the only one I tried that imported all my iPod meta data to iTunes without screwing anything. I had an empty library, that little tool rebuilt it from my iPod in no time.
Go for it!