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Recreating My Music Server

My mac, a blue & white G3, has not had a good year.  First the DVD drive went kaput.  Next, my monitor fizzled out.  Finally just last week I had a gruesome hard drive crash. 

After backing everything up and reinstalling OS X I have begun to rebuild what was the most labourious part of my previous setup—my music.  I have an 80 gig drive dedicated entirely to MP3s, and it was at half-capacity at the time of the crash.

With around 600 CDs (and let’s be honest, a song or two from the Internet) it will take quite a while to re-rip every CD back into MP3.  But losing everything has been very cathartic.  It’s a lengthy task, but relatively brainless—pop in a CD, hit “convert” and wait for it to end.  In alphabetical order I have so far converted “ABBA” through “Björk”.  I already don’t look forward to the C’s—with about 50 Elvis Costello albums and bootlegs alone it’s without a doubt the biggest part of my collection.

The real loss, however, is not all the archived music, but iTunes‘s playlists and various statisitics such as play count, song rating, date added, etc. that are now lost and have to be recreated.  And with nearly 40 gigs of music, that’s not an overnight task.

But the exciting part is that now I have a wireless network thanks to my new Airport.  And with the help of iTunes’ network-sharing I am able to keep all my music on my G3 but use my iMac to play the songs through my home stereo system, which was the point of having a music server in the first place.

Soon I will be able to play any song in my collection without having to look for or touch the actual CD.  MP3s and my iPod have changed the way I listen to music.  No longer am I limited to just one CD… I can create playlists, see which songs I play the most, sort songs by artist, genre, rank… I could never go back to listening to music on CD.

There are some side effects to the digital music revolution, however.  For one, the tactility of scanning a shelf of CDs, selecting a case and opening the CD player is gone.  MP3s have taken all the sense of anticipation out of listening to music—they give instant gratification.  This also lends to my ability to play every song I own on random, which I most always do, so I don’t appreciate full albums and their original song order as much as I was able to with CDs.  In fact, after being conditioned by listening to digital music I find I have a much shorter attention span.  I am far less likely to give a new album the time it deserves when I know that with a click of a button I can instantly hear something I know I like.

But the convenience and interaction of digital music is worth it to me.  Besides, otherwise how would I ever get to hear Marilyn Manson, Petula Clark, and the theme to Magilla Gorilla all in one sitting?