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Damn the RIAA to Hell

Came across mongoosedog's entry about his unfortunate iPod experience today. I guess first, I should welcome him into the iPod secret society. Second, I should tell my own little story of iPod woe.

This entry is about the unfortunate convergence of circumstances that led to the demise of my entire mp3 collection. Prior to my purchasing the iPod a couple of months ago, my mp3 collection was mostly encoded at 128 kbps, with only stuff that I'd recently (in the past year or two) encoded being at higher bitrates or VBR. I had all of this old stuff backed up on CD-R, so when I got the iPod, populating it with music was pretty easy to do. However, with the purchase of the iPod, I decided it was time to get as much of that old stuff updated into VBR (specifically, I used Exact Audio Copy and LAME 3.92 with -v -V0 -b128 -q2 options). So over the past couple of months, I've been slowly but surely going through my entire CD collection. Mostly, it was a matter of putting in a disc to rip and encode while I did something else, so it wasn't like I spent hundreds of hours just sitting there doing this, but it did mean a lot of effort was expended.

So eventually, a few weeks ago, I finally got caught up with my entire collection. I had just over a thousand songs on the iPod, worth about 6 GB. When I bought the 5400 RPM hard drive for my Dell laptop and put the old drive into an external FireWire/USB2 case, I even backed up the entire contents of my iPod to the external drive. Life was good.

The only hitch was that I couldn't use the software that came with the iPod. I mean, Musicmatch Jukebox may be an OK media player, but it was an atrocious abomination of a shadow of a bastardization of a semblance of an interface into the iPod. So I ditched it almost immediately. Eventually, I settled upon EphPod, a fine piece of software for managing the music collection on the iPod. Having now used iTunes on the Mac for the same purpose, I will say that for iPod music management, no other piece of software comes close. Among the myriad of wonderful feature it incorporated was a feature that let you put all your music files into a single directory on the iPod, rather than the 20 directories that Apple spreads your files out into if you use either iTunes or Musicmatch.

Now I'm going to step aside here and get back on my music industry bashing soapbox. See, I know that the reason why Apple makes it such a pain in the ass for people to get to the music files and directly manipulate them is because the RIAA lit a fire under Apple in their holy war to preserve the record labels' profits. Note very clearly that I said "record labels' profits," not "artists profits" or "artists rights." One of the reasons why I feel so strongly about why the RIAA must fail is because I find it deplorable that they twist the nature of their efforts in the hopes that people will be blind to the underlying truth: the fact that this is truly all about stuffing record label executive's pockets full of money at the expense of the consumer as well as the artist.

So why did I just get up on that soapbox? And what does it have to do with my iPod?

Well, because of their asinine holy war, I had to resort to non-standard utilities and methods to manage my music collection on the iPod. When I made the Switch to Mac a few days ago, one of the things that I did without thinking about it was to hook up my iPod and try out iTunes.

Without telling me anything had happened, iTunes wiped my entire music collection from the iPod. I didn't find out about this until the next day, when I tried to play some music only to hear nothing as it went through each song in the database. See, it didn't wipe the database, so the iPod still thought that it had over a thousand songs on there, and all the title and track information were still intact too. Just that the files were gone.

Now some of you might say, "that's what you get for using non-standard software, blah blah blah" and I actually do agree with you. Most of the time, when I use non-standard software... or, heck, when I do anything in a non-standard way, I am ready to accept the consequences. I believe that the standard way is boring, that it is designed for people who want a standard experience. I don't. I want the Deluxe Experience. And I understand that with the Deluxe Experience sometimes come Deluxe Consequences. Fine.

But in this case, these consequences were brought about by a preponderance of ridiculous circumstances which existed solely because the RIAA is so overzealous in its litigious persecution of literally everyone under the sun.

So if you haven't been distracted by my soapbox rant, you are probably wondering at this point what happened to the backup that I'd mentioned on that FireWire external drive...

Well, in one last insult to the injury, that drive died not more than a couple of weeks after I took it out of the Dell. I'm happy that it didn't die while it was still my primary hard drive, because that would have been far more catastrophic than losing a bunch of mp3 files. But yes, it died. So I had no backup of the contents of my iPod when I started up iTunes without thinking about the possible consequences. I guess it was the honeymoon euphoria with my new PowerBook...

Oh well. Lesson learned: continue efforts to destroy RIAA.

PGP Signed Entry