3014 Down, 2000 More To Go

There is something very character-building about hand-indexing five thousand songs. Having laboured over this task in fits and starts over the past couple of weeks, I can confidently say that I am now a better person. More patient. More meticulous. More thin. OK, not more thin, but all the rest is true.

When my hard drive crashed and died, I lost all the songs on it. I retrieved them from my iPod onto a new drive, but iTunes refused to associate the songs on the iPod with the same songs in the hard drive. So what's the problem, you ask? The problem was that I was about one third of the way into listening to and assigning ratings to every single one of the five thousand songs in my library. If I was now unable to match the records in the hard drive with the songs on the iPod, I would lose over a hundred hours worth of song ratings. There is no way that someone with an obsessive-compulsive streak like me could bear such a loss. So the only choice left to me was to match each song to its MP3 file manually.

(I could explain why I was so keen to have all the songs rated, but it won't make me sound any less crazy so I won't bother.)

After indexing about five hundred songs I realized that this could be an informative experience. For instance...

I noticed that by far the funniest song titles belong to the Ramones. In 1974, Dee Dee, Johnny and Joey Ramone played their first concert. They did not really have the same name; they just thought it would be amusing to pretend to be brothers. With that same whimsical sense of humour they went on to record songs like "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue", "I Just Want To Have Something To Do", "The KKK Took My Baby Away", and my favourite: "I Wanna Be Sedated".

On the other hand Pink Floyd are the masters of the weird song title. After "Pigs On The Wing" and "Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk" you think you've seen it all. Then you come across " Careful With That Axe, Eugene" and you think the limit of eccentricity has been reached. Then you spot "Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict". I'm convinced that the band used to generate song titles by picking words at random from a dictionary and squeezing a preposition or two in the middle just to make a complete phrase.

Be that as it may, one can only entertain oneself with song titles for so long. It came to a point in the indexing process that I began to wonder whether I had lost my mind. Was the effort I was putting into it worthwhile? If I decided to just give up on the ratings, would it really be so bad?

Then, just as I was about to lose my religion, my faith came back to me in the form of jet lag-induced insomnia. I spent six hours in a late-night marathon of keyboard-bashing. I knocked the whole darned library into shape and order emerged out of the chaos on my hard drive. Beautiful order, rising like Aphrodite from the foam.

With a silent (lest I wake the neighbourhood) roar of triumph I clutched my iPod to my chest, did a little victory lap around my chair, and fell into a deep victorious sleep such as only the righteous can enjoy.

Now all I need to do is listen to all the as-yet-unrated songs and rate them. It should only take me another couple of hundred hours or so to finish that task.

Anyone got a straitjacket to spare?