I got the music in me

It has taken me more than a month to get around to setting up my music playlists on my new computer. It has taken me in fact til Tuesday, (a band I have several tracks by).

I had backed up my music folder from the dying laptop when it initially began dying back in June. Then, just to be sure, I backed it up again in July when I bought my Asus. I took the time then to do a little cleaning & reorganizing of my music. There were still things in an iTunes folder and I haven’t had iTunes in 3 years. I have a Creative Zen & use their organizer which doesn’t force itself on you quite the way iTunes does. There  were also some duplicate tracks for things I had ripped from CD in 2005, forgot about & re-ripped in 2008 and a myriad of unnecessary subfolders. I cleaned all that mess up, straightened out the folders and backed it all up again.

I copied it all to my new laptop and got involved in retagging my scrap supplies and downloading things to view .nef photos and other things to make my software compatible with Vista. It was not until Tuesday, faced with a low battery on my Zen and a missing power cord, that I decided to listen to music on my laptop.

I knew I would have to recreate my playlists so I started sorting music in the player software. I discovered that I had 1500 songs.

Actually I have about 1000 songs. 500 were duplicates.

Well about 350 were duplicates. Another 100 were triplicates and about 50 were quadruplicates.

Somehow a large selection of my music collection was copied into a Flogging Molly album folder. A smaller selection of that was also copied into my ‘CD music’ folder and a smaller selection of that was also also copied into the main ‘My Music’ folder.

Some interesting facts about this are that those 3 backups were done on two different EHDs. One of those EHDs was reformatted before a second copying was done on it. The original file structure, still on the old laptop, does not include folders in a Flogging Molly folder, but that laptop overheats long before I can recopy the files.

Most interesting though….

I don’t have any Flogging Molly CDs and I have never bought any of their music. Yet, I have their Float album on my hard drive.

Twice.

And one of those folders has about a third of my music duplicated in it.

But!

Not everything in the Flogging Molly folder is a duplicate. Some of it is the only copy of that music. So I can’t just delete the thing and be done with it. I have to go through it track by track & match it up to the rest of my music collection, which is a misery. And that isn’t considering the Christmas music. Do you know how many versions of Away in a Manger and the Holly & the Ivy I have? Plus there are oddities like Rock Lobster, of which I have 5 copies, only one in the Flogging Molly folder and none in the other 2 places, which means I apparently imported it on 2-3 separate occasions and bought it online at least once despite owning the CD already.

I have my audiobooks highly organized and tracked on spreadsheets.  Music? Notsomuch.

I can delete the tracks relatively easily, if tediously, with my player software but it only deletes the tracks, not the folders of the albums. So I still have to go through all the folders & check if they are empty & move the ones that aren’t & delete the ones that are.

Then I can try to recreate my old playlists.

My Zen will be done charging long before I finish with this.