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Last night my Time Machine drive kinda went bye-bye and it forced my to delete a bucket load of files on my system’s drive to make way for a folder I kept on that drive of design work…shoot! Where did all my music work go? I feel sick. Oh crap!

OK, panic over! I had mysteriously put my In The Red Deeps stuff inside that design work folder I rescued from the backup drive before I reformatted it. Oh that was scary! From me writing “shoot” to “OK, panic over” was probably less than two minutes but I was already heading towards a hissy fit of tears and tantrums. I was trying to pacify myself by thinking “I’ll be able to laugh at this one day” and “it’s just 0’s and 1’s, don’t cry David. Big boys don’t cry”. Frightening stuff! Who would have thought a blog post could be so full of drama? So stop reading this right now! Stop it and don’t come back until you’ve backed up everything that is precious to you!

Interlude

I feel a little better now that your precious 0’s and 1’s are all safe and sound so I’ll get back to writing this post. I brought up the Time Machine debacle because it created a need to clear up some space on my system drive and iTunes was the easy target. You see, I hate the connivence of having my music a mouse click away because nowadays I listen to songs, not albums. I LOVE albums, I love the way they take you on a journey with them. How you’re in a different “place” by track 12 than you were with track one. I love it when bands save that special song for last; the culmination, the climax, the sound of the diligent little laser beam returning to it’s starting position, the silence of the room, bliss.

The shuffle button has ruined that experience for me. Multi-disc CD players are the slightly less evil cousin of the iTunes shuffle button. Less evil because my Four Tet CD doesn’t need to be taken out of the machine when my wife want’s to listen to her favourites. So as of now my iTunes is essentially empty apart from the stuff I don’t have on CD (they’re mostly live tracks and b-sides of bands I’ve spend money on anyway. I can sleep easy with that.) and if I want to listen to music while working (which is 99.9% of the time) I go to my CD collection, decide who I want to spend the next 60 minutes with and try not to get distracted from my work by the beauty of the “album”.

I think the time I lose going into the bedroom and rifling through my modest collection is probably less than the time I lost clicking next in iTunes and going through a thousand songs in random order until chance put something in my headphones I was in the mood for.