I am the kind of person who lives a lone wolf lifestyle. I have a girlfriend, friends, family, all of which I get along with very well. But for some reason I have always found solace and comfort in my alone time more than I have ever with any of those people. Thats not to say I dont care about them or love them. But I just dont need them, if that makes any sense at all. Anyways that's beside the point. During my time by myself i have found alot of comfort/entertainment in both team liquid, reddit and other forms of digital entertainment (Movies, music, streaming etc). Music and movies in particular are always a constant source of joy. I am not depressed, lonely, or even unhappy. I just simply enjoy things like chilling out at home listening to tunes while playing video games or watching 3-4 movies in a row. As I lived out the bliss of my nerdy lifestyle last weekend, disaster struck.
My music collection is absurdly big, I mean were talking 10,000 songs at least and another ton on an external hard drive, and I have a specific hard drive for about my top 400 songs and important pictures that appeal to me, and have updated this drive all my life. These songs have been with me through thick and thin, and I have put together this list throughout my childhood and adult life. Each song has meaning and memory behind it. It could have been a song from a fun camping trip with friends, a grad song, or the theme of my European adventure. The point is, this music is important to me. While I know every song on this list of approximatly 400 songs as soon as I hear it, I could never sit down and name each song in row, and like a fool I had never written it down. What could happen?
Last weekend my main hardrive crashed on my computer, and I lost approximately 11000 songs. But I was okay, I had my important songs backed up on an external hard drive, and while I could never remember 10,000 songs and get them back (aside from the ones purchased through Itunes) it wasnt bugging me to much. I then went and bought a new drive, installed it, and was kind of relieved that I had so much disk space! As expected I went to the external hard drive to upload the songs I had onto the new drive, my stomach heaved as I found the drive full of thousands of pictures.... pictures of school children.....My girlfriend is a teacher, and she had no idea that I kept that hard drive for a very specific reason, she had backed up her laptop on it and in the process all her music, pictures etc had completely wiped my drive. All that glorious music lost forever. It was a troublesome and stormy time in our relationship.
Needless to say I was fucking choked, she had unintentionally rocked the fucking boat. Haha. After sitting down for several hours I could only think of about 150 songs from the list, and obviously that wasnt going to cut it. All was lost. Hope was forgotten. Sadness took hold.
A few days later I got a call from my mother, she had found my old Ipod in the backseat of her car (the car I used to drive to university in). It was scratched and the screen mashed and chipped, looked like it had been sitting in the sun for 15 hours a day. She was phoning to see if she should throw it out (note: I do not have an existing Ipod, because of my hatred for apple, but thats another story).
For the first time in days I had a glimmer of hope. I grabbed my keys and raced over to my moms house to find my Old pressure cooked iPod. Upon seeing it for the first time I was pretty glum. Obviously the battery was dead but it looked like there was no way it worked. I took it home, charged it, and went to hook it up to my current itunes. Miraculously it turned on, I couldnt really read the screen, but I could see the light. I turned off auto sync so it wouldnt wipe the ipod, but Itunes said the versions were incompatible and an update was needed. I was terrified the update would cause a sync or a wipe so I couldnt figure out what to do.
To be clear this was a generation one Ipod Nano, alla 2003-2004 and it was seriously buggered. No method I could get to work to manually remove the songs from the Ipod.
Enter The Little App Factory, I logged onto TL to see what kind of apps they had. I vaguely remembered their first program called iRip but I had never known what it was for. Reading the description of iRip, its basically exactly what I needed and to my delight, a hundred free songs were on the trial. I was a little worried about the version and oldness of my Ipod being a problem for the app but it was seriously the easiest and most user friendly application I have ever used.
I purchased the full version, plugged in my iPod to my computer, hit Auto detect and away we went. Within 15 minutes my entire Ipod, and about 350 of the glorious songs were back on my PC. The iPod hadnt been updated in a while with the newer songs but those ones were alot easier to remember. iRip literally saved the songs of my memories. I cant thank them enough.
If anyone ever needs something from TLAF I would encourage you to try it. I was so happy with the service and the results from an old outdated broken iPod that I will be looking to purchase other apps from them in the near future. Thanks TLAF for saving my life! (Figuratively of course =P)
Well thats pretty much it, I didnt realize it would be so long just from that short little story but a huge thanks to TLAF for saving the memories of a TL nerd!
edit. Sorry for the terrible Grammar ><