Data Panic in the Year Zero

So about the time I was getting ready to buy my house, there was a musical calamity. The hard drive where I held all 40,000 or so of my music files (180+ gigs) went "kerchunk" when I tried to access it, and became a useless door stop.

Let the panic begin.

To make matters worse, after I acquired a new hard drive I figured I could just dump the 70-some gigs of music from my iPod onto the new hard drive and at least have a base. Except I didn't set it up right, and erased everything except the music I had purchased from iTunes.

Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.

Which meant I've started from point zero with my collection. As I've felt overwhelmed for some time by it, this isn't entirely a bad thing. I plan to take my time over the next few months to rebuild it into something trimmer -- with music I may actually listen to, instead of everything that just sounds interesting. I thought about being orderly about it -- only loading so many tunes each day (my day job allows me to listen to music, so I can get through a bunch), and in some kind of coherent fashion -- but instead decided it was best to just wing it, the way you may play music that excites you for a friend.

A couple of weeks down, there are about 1,500 songs already loaded. I'm trying to listen to it all, but there are some albums I know I want no matter what. Still, I'm trying to slowly load even those acts,  adding Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie in the last couple of weeks, and even trimming those collections (David, "Tonight," why?) So, I'll chime in every so often on what I've discovered so far. 

Oh, and the title of this post reminds me that I need to track down my Pere Ubu.