Mourning My Playlists

I am officially an iPod slayer. I got my seventh one on Thursday. I've only paid for three -- the first a Mini about four years ago. The battery on that one failed in the first year and Apple replaced it. Then I upgraded to a "regular" iPod and that one in turn failed also. This is now my third 60G iPod -- its brethren both victims of some sort of hard disk failure that led to clicking and skipping during songs.

I thought I had prepared before I went to the Apple store -- I made lists of the songs in my On The Go playlists so I could recreate them, knowing that the rest of my playlists were on my computer and would synch into the new iPod. But when I got home and opened up iTunes (with a recent new version installed) my library was empty. Completely empty. I had to copy all of my music back into iTunes from elsewhere on the computer and in the process all of my playlists disappeared.

I'm still in shock.

I create a playlist for each significant piece of writing I undertake. I spent quite a bit of time on these and build them over the course of weeks. Once I have a decent playlist it is the soundtrack for my work on that piece of writing. I have hours of ballet music that got me through my big dance project; I had a playlist with songs I listened to during college for a potential novel; I had a playlist which was a combination of Sousa marches and mid-career Stevie Wonder for a short story about when I was forced to join a marching band when I was in high school. But now they are all gone.

Tomorrow I leave for a two week vacation to Germany and France. I've been running errands for days, making sure we have enough cat food on hand for the person who is taking care of the cats, printing out driving directions, scanning copies of passports. But what I really want to do is recreate some of my old playlists and make some new ones. I'm not sure I can face a ten hour flight without them.