Be Good Not Bad : Web Design :: Brian Warren : Denver, Colorado

This Article was written by Aaron Orr, Watchtan’s part-time contributer.

18.98 gigabytes of music. That’s what my iPod contained. That’s a lot of music representing hundreds of years. From Modest Mussorgsky and Leopold Mozart to modern classics like Haddaway’s “What is Love” made popular by the movie “Night at The Roxbury.” There was a bit of everything for every one of my moods. There was hard, working out music, soft, relaxing music, loud, angry music, country music, pop, celtic, latin. But it’s all gone now. A bazillion ones and zeros turned into digital mush.

I would probably be really upset if this was Apple’s fault. But it’s not. I have no one to blame but myself.

After painstakingly updating composer information for several dozen classical tunes I switched my computer to update my iPod automatically. Automatic is good right? It requires no thinking. Well, no thinking is what happened.

“Are you sure you want to enable automatic updating?” The warning window asked. “All existing songs and playlists on the iPod “ippopodimus” will be replaced with songs and playlists from the iTunes music library.”

No worries, I thought, I’ve been working in the iTunes music browser. But I knew full well that all that music was on my iPod, not on my hard drive. I had cleared it from my hard drive to allow room for video editing. But I clicked “OK” anyhow. iTunes then did as I asked: It deleted the 3,500 songs on my iPod and replaced them with the 148 songs from my computer’s hard drive.

Recently one of my buddies leant me some CDs from his collection and now my iTunes music library, and my iPod, reads like a who’s who of the 1980s hair bands has-beens. If they were a hot rock band in the 80s, my computer is now the definitive source: AC/DC, The Best of Cinderella, Def Leppard’s Greatest Hits (not the same album my sister had in high school that my parents threw in the trash and I rescued and returned to her—but that’s a whole nother story), Guns N’ Roses, Kiss, Metallica, and Poison and Queensryche’s greatest hits.

If karma exists this is something I had coming to me. Maybe this is what I get for undermining my parents all those years ago with that Def Leppard tape.

So in the spirit of the internet, where people seem to never think twice about dropping cash, you can make a donation to my new music library through the itunes store. http://www.apple.com/itunes/ Links on the bottom left of the page allow your generosity to know no bounds. (Okay, $10-$200. But that’s practically boundless.) My email address is aaronjorr@mac.com. (You’ll need it for your electronic beneficence.)