I'm surprised by how much grief this causes me. As it turns out, my experience of these songs is determined by the record of how I've lived with them -- without the information about how I've listened to them, and how often, and what I thought of them, they're just not my songs. It makes sense, at some level; Art without curation or creation without witness leaves a work mute. But as geeks, a lot of us wouldn't even necessarily see this as data loss -- the original files, after all, is still there.
There's a lesson here for the prophets of abundance, and for all of us who see formerly valuable things becoming commodities. We might be able to replace the raw materials with their abundant, or even free, counterparts. But if our emotional experiences are lost along the way, the perfect digital copies are worthless, too.
]]>No idea if that'll work, but I suppose it's worth a try.
]]>On the other hand, you get to start over, and perhaps that's exciting too? A clean slate and all. Perhaps you'll develop a whole new set of tastes.
]]>Also, is the fate of all iTunes libraries their ultimate corruption? It certainly seems that way. I'm surprised Apple doesn't do more to protect this data when it operates on the library file.
]]>Once upon a time, the record of how we lived with music was a visceral one: I know I listened to Living Colour's "Time's Up" countless times in my Nissan Maxima, on my old metal Sony Discman with the wires running up the dash. One did not need a computer to track play counts and add stars.
I suppose this is why I have yet to digitize the majority of my music (despite the thousands of tracks on my iPod I have a good thousand or so CDs I've never ripped), and why year-end blog posts stating "here are the bands I played the most" somehow strike me as a little thin compared to true "what I love" items. For me, still, the best music is felt, not logged.
Also: dude! No backup?
]]>Jeremy
BTW, your OpenID "Sign in" button leads me to a page that generates an "Internal Server Error" :-(
]]>Hopefully you had something like the last.fm itunes plugin (audioscrobbler) installed, so your music preferences might be (sort of) backed up with them. Even with the new iPhone, if I can access all my data (and listen to music through last.fm or pandora) why do I need iTunes and iSync?
]]>And the common unifying theme is apparently this - that the digital cognoscenti apparently don't know how to/can't be bothered to make backups.
If you had a backup, you could just restore your iTunes Library, and voila! you'd have all your metadata back, at least as of the last time you backed up (which should be nightly, right?).
Besides your metadata, is what you do for your day-job not important enough that you should really back up your data? If not, maybe you're overpaid.
;>
]]>p.s. This is all on a Mac over here so ymmv.
]]>You've lost all 4 of those files? (Or both, I'm not sure what generates the copies.) If you still have the original XML, just start iTunes without the binary but with the XML present and it will rebuild the binary from the XML.
]]>Now I feel like my iPod is trapped in time. I can't add anything new because the minute I synch I will lose all the playlists I spent so much time creating.
]]>The idea of "owning our music" is a dubious one, as wel. Who really owns it anyway? A while ago, Napster started promoting the idea "own nothing - listen to everything" for its all-you-can-eat subscription plan. I can't imagine our ownership society will go for that very quickly, but it's a peaceful idea to be sure - to let the music go and just experience what you can, when you can.
]]>Not only does it sucks if iTunes decides to attach C4 to its database and pull the trigger, but it sucks if you want to use the files somewhere else too, for example on another computer or in another music player. Had the information been copyrighted to Apple, I'd understand the decision to lock it in, but considering that it's iTunes' users that have used hours and hours writing this information into their own songs themselves, it doesn't make any sense at all.
]]>Over the "millions and millions" of reads and writes previously discussed, inevitably an mp3 would get corrupted or destroyed, and this would much be worse than occasionally having to restore your backed up iTunes library.
]]>There are multi-user issues as well. While titles and album art and lyrics and such are intrinsically part of the song, a play count or a rating is unique to the combination of the song *and* the user, as are playlists. Some of my MP3 files are in both my library and my wife's, and we *definitely* have different ideas about the rating for certain songs!
]]>OK, but it's still a long leap to the conclusion that such metadata "needs" to be stored in undocumented vendor-specific binary formats. (And no, the XML "backup" files that iTunes creates do not contain all the metadata that Anil cares about. In fact, they are lacking specifically the metadata that Anil cares about most.)
And once again, as has happened so many times in the past, it is amazing how quickly the discussion has shifted from "Apple destroyed my data" to "let's all talk about backup strategies." Yes, backing up my data is important. Hard drives fail. I do stupid things on the command line. My software destroys its one and only complete copy of my data. Hmm... one of these things is entirely preventable and its repeated occurrence is entirely the software vendor's fault; see if you can figure out which one.
]]>But if it does, I hereby withdraw my negative comment. And keeping non-standard-ID3 stuff out of the ID3 tag is of course the right thing to do. But Apple could extend ID3 openly as well, as long as they do it in a backwards compatible way and lets everybody know how and why they are doing it.
]]>