The Gimcrack Miscellany

My Music’s Safe. Is Yours?

Posted on 07. Sep, 2007 by The Gimcracker in Music, Stuff On The Internet

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: two priests and a rabbi walk into a bar, and my hard drive crashes and I lose my entire music library.

That means I lost not only the purchased music for which I do not own physical backups (e.g. iTunes downloads, CDs I’ve lost, CDs I’ve illegally borrowed and ripped – whoops, scratch that last one), but I’ve lost the countless hours it took to rip my entire music collection into Windows Media Player and then convert into my iTunes library. It’s like recording yourself knocking down an amazing array of dominoes and forgetting to turn the video camera on, twice.

Don’t cry for me blogosphina, because I keep my music library on my work PC as well, which means all I had to do was purchase a mobile hard drive to tote my songs home with me. For our current purposes, let’s assume you do not have a redundant music library or $130 to spend on this stylish red flask hard drive. Mmmm, whisky sectors.

So, here’s where you stand: you have 5 gazillion [legal] songs on your hard drive and you want them to be safe, like mine. That’s where MP3tunes.com comes in. It is a free, unlimited storage locker for your songs. After you create your account you can download a handy application that syncs your local library with your online library. What this means is you can upload all of your songs at work (took me about a day and a half to upload 4300 tracks), listen to them online from any computer, and then download them when you get home. Presto! Now you have identical music libraries on all of your workstations.

The software is smart enough to do it all automatically, so you don’t have to worry about uploading/downloading anything manually – although you have that option. During syncs it hogs your system resources, but you can just pause it if you need a boost. You can also run it over night or during the weekend if you don’t want to deal with it.

I’m no longer afraid to buy that next computer, because I know I won’t have to spend 2 weeks of my life re-ripping all those live Pearl Jam albums. Did you ever notice they have more live albums than regular albums? It’s ridiculous.