Take a good look at this picture. For any of you that have their music on their iPod or Iphone, you'll recognize that it is the iTunes page. There's something missing from this particular page, though, a screenshot that I've taken of my own iTunes, If you look towards the left of the screen, you can see the column that shows all of your iTunes playlists, and none that I have created over the years is there.
You see, about six months ago, I purchased a new laptop, something that, as a regular pc user, I need to do every six years or so. Since my time is so limited during the school year, and since my old pc was still working, I was slow to start moving things over to the new one. Moving over to a new computer is always a daunting task....bookmarks, passwords (ugh, everyone's got a different rule for that...use one capital letter and one symbol, at least one number, no less than eight characters), external programs, etc. For any of you who use iTunes for your music, you'll know that moving your iTunes library over to a new computer can be the biggest headache.
This new pc of mine is probably like the sixth I've had over the years, and I've had iTunes on all of them, which means I've moved iTunes libraries over from one to the next, successfully, several times. This time, however, I am at a loss! And here comes the rant...
I realize that in today's world, there is a lot of piracy out there, and with music it is especially so as a large number of people do not purchase their music, but find ways to download it illegally. The only times I have ever not purchased music was when the song was not available on iTunes, and those times have been very few and far between. Virtually all of the music I've got in my iTunes library was purchased through the site. Yet, as always, I have to suffer because of this.
For twelve years, beginning in the 90's, I was a deejay, and so I've got a lot of CD's. All of them were purchased legally back in the days when the CD was all we had. Once I moved to the digital age of music, which overall I think is absolutely wonderful, I downloaded all of my CD music into my iTunes library. It is the greater portion of the music I have there. The other night, I had a lot of free time and I decided to work on getting my iTunes library over to my new laptop once and for all. Little by little, I've managed to get everything else over and this is the last thing that keeps me from ditching my old, slow computer.
There I sat, in my office, for about four and a half hours, both pc's turned on and a passport in hand. I copied every file I could find that related to anything music from my old laptop and moved it into the iTunes icon on the new pc via the passport. All that moved over were my iTunes downloads, again and again. No playlists nor music from any CD. And to boot, it copied every song twice...something to do with clouds, which I am still trying to understand. I searched through Google for answers. I tried everything. Dead end after dead end. Now we're into July and it's now been seven months since I bought my new computer and still...no iTunes library.
I figure I have a choice. I can either re-download all of my old CD's, which would probably take weeks, and re-do all of my playlists...weeks more, or I can put this out there in the hopes that someone can help me. iTunes has a service called Match, where supposedly they will find all of your stuff in your iTunes library and match it with your account so this problem is supposedly solved, and all for the nominal fee of $24.99 a year. Well I think that's bullshit! Why should I have to re-pay iTunes for all of my music again, just because Apple makes it so hard to move my legally downloaded music that I got from old CD's I purchased?
No, I refuse to do that! I'd much rather go through all of that hassle than to pay again for my music. As it is, I hesitate to buy new stuff to add to my library until I've got my library in proper order, and that is pissing me off more than anything. So, if only someone from Apple would read this and do something about it. I should not have to suffer so because of these idiots who pirate music. I do things the right way and yet I suffer for it. Not fair! If anybody within the reach of this blog has any advice for me before I start the trudgery of re-doing anything, please help!
