So, as some of you may know, I am a total audio-phile. I collect music by the dozen, building, organizing, listening, then organizing (again) my iTunes library constantly. At its best, my iTunes library had over 32,000 songs that would play continuously over 3 months. And that was just the straight music. I had many videos, as well. Not to mention my many handmade playlists I’d been making over the last 5 years, including mixes I had made for friends, mixes I had made for myself, and some other playlists were just further means for organizing my library.
However, haste and stupidity put everything at risk. My external hard drive that contained my iTunes library (for my internal hard drive could not store all my music) was formatted for optimal performance between PCs and Macs. I own a Mac myself, but as long as I was still in school, it made sense to make my hard drive compatible with school computers too, for projects and such. However, it slowed down transfer time and running time ON MY MAC significantly. Once I graduated, I decided it was time to reformat the hard drive for Mac use. After making a backup, of course.
I made room on another hard drive, then started the transfer and went off to some social outing, leaving it transferring. When I came back, there was no more progress bar, so I assumed the transfer went fine. Without checking my backup (stupid stupid stupid), I reformatted my hard drive. Only about one third of all the data had transferred to the other hard drive. I wanted to roll over and die. I feared my precious and beloved iTunes library had been lost forever.
I sent my hard drive to a computer repair company in New York (PCMD). They were able to recover a VAST majority of my music, and they sent me my drive back. Upon reimporting to iTunes, I have found that a great many of the songs have duplicates, of varying lengths, and some tracks will not play for the full duration. Oh, and all my videos and playlists are gone forever too.
While getting most of the music back is, of course, fantastic, I now find myself having to go slowly through my iTunes library, checking every song to see if it plays all the way through, occasionally having to reimport a song from a CD to replace a corrupted file. I do understand it was my own damn fault. And it’s probably the biggest effing mistake I have ever made. Needless to say, I will NEVER do it again.
In the meantime, I will be slowly checking every song in my iTunes library until I am 55 (I am currently up to Alan Menken).
