iTunes

A few months ago, I reformatted my hard drive. Wiped it clean. Best decision I ever made. I backed up everything, all my pictures, my music, my documents - even the stuff from college classes, stuff I'll never use or see again. Just in case, you know, the school comes calling and says, "Hey, we need to see that rough draft of your section of that final group project from Spanish 201, otherwise we're taking back your diploma." Boom, got it. Si, yo tengo. (Am I the only one that hangs onto this crap?) Anyway. I saved everything. Except, somehow my collection of the top 100 hip-hop songs from the 1990s disappeared. My library is now sadly lacking of The Diggable Planets and Nas.

Which leaves me with only 2,653 songs. Most of them acquired entirely legally, off my own CDs or via amazonmp3.com ($1.99 for Andrew Bird, $3.99 for The Killers. Yessss.) I don't know how my collection ballooned that big, but I do know that it's dwarfed in comparison to many others. (Sidenote: What if I started one of those annoying facebook chain letters asking people about their iTunes playlists. How many songs? Ten most listened to? Ten most recently listened to? How many unplayed?)

iTunes is great because it tracks all your music and how many times you've played it. I like this feature, and I assume it's standard for most players... iTunes probably isn't so special. But when I wiped my compy clean, iTunes reset itself. Curses. Back to zero on everything. Time was, a guy could look back and see which songs were played most often, which ones were rated the highest. No more. I know I listened to Intergalactic more than 40 times... but now it's back to zero. And so, I threw together a playlist of the good ones, and slowly sought out my favorites again.

So I made a playlist of all the unplayed ones. I have 1,619 songs which, as far as I know, I've never heard before. And right now I'm working it down to zero. I've found a few good ones - I would never, ever have sought out "Go Faster," by the Black Crowes, but I found it, and I'm sure it will be on the playlist for the gym. And I really like that demo of Jefferson Aeroplane from Relient K's Bird and the Bee Sides album. Also found: A Petra (yeah, that's right, Petra) medley with The Coloring Song, Derek Webb's Please before I go, and lots of other great stuff that would have been skipped over and never been put into a playlist.

I challenge you to do the same. Cuz, life is like a box of chocolates. Or something.