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The Joy of Playlist Archeology

Jun 16, 02:14 AM

So, I had some serious writing work to do in the wee hours of the night/morning and as is usual for me, I decided to hunt down some music to play.

 

I’ve put together playlists of music constantly, throughout my entire life as a computer user. It’s been a weird process too. Over the years my system for organizing my music has become increasingly arcane, a problem only compounded by the now huge size of my music collection.

At first, the various digital playlists were created in order to burn tracks to MP3 CDs, back in  the day when I hauled around 1 of a sequence of 3 nearly identical MP3 CD players (they were all blue, in case you were wondering). However, it became an important way to track associated musical tracks that may have been in different places. Then my music playing program, WinAmp began to evolve.

I was able to maintain the WinAmp database of my music over many years, nearly 8 years I think. The database was especially important because it tracked how I rated songs, how many times they were played, and when they had been added to the collection. In the past 6 or 7 years, I had become completely reliant on the WinAmp database. I took great lengths to preserve it. In fact, the save install of Windows XP was on my computer for a very very long time, the disk image traveling from one harddisk to another via the application of an extremely complicated process involving 3 harddrives and Partition Magic.

At regular times throughout this process, I backed up snapshots of my highest rated, most played and various other playlist configurations. There were saved to .m3u playlist files and almost all put on various harddrives and my mp3 player.

When I rebuilt my computer, which I guess is almost a year ago now (wow that time sort of flew away from me) I suffered a set of failures. My loyal iRiver MP3Player died; I was unable to transfer drive images (not that I wanted to anyway, I switched to Win7); and when I went to transfer content back to my desktop from a portable harddrive a weird accident wiped out the file table, making my data inaccessible.

I had thought my treasured playlists gone.

Not willing to try and hunt down the playlists from their varied places while facing the possibility that they might not exist at all, I let my music collection sit almost entirely stagnant. I switched back to using Pandora, discovered The61 and blip.fm and sorted through what parts of my music I could find on LaLa.com.

Fed up with the internet during the latest writing interval, I decided to try and hunt them down via a *.m3u search. I have a lot of the .m3u files, but I was able to not only find the latest batch of playlists, but ones dating all the way back to when I first started making playlists.

As I’ve been looking through them (many of them still don’t work but can be viewed, I have to to a global find and replace to adjust for the new drive letter) I’ve had to laugh. We all know that our music tastes have changed over the years, and that we probably used to listed to some weird/horrible music, but having the opportunity to see it all laid out in front of my was something else.  It was pretty cool to see my musical growth like that.

posted by: Aram

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