Staring into the abyss: iTunes crashes again

"As long as there is attachment to things that are unstable, unreliable, changing and impermanent, there will be suffering ..."

... which is hard to disagree with. Not least when you go on your computer, open up your (foolishly-relied-upon) iTunes library and find ... nothing. A void. Pure emptiness. Where two days before there had been more than 30,000 songs, now there's tabula rasa. Niente. Nowt. Yep, this is what happened to me a couple of days ago. What the fuck. Where were all the songs? All the playlists (about 750 of these)? Gone, absolutely fucking gone. God knows how or why - my PC hadn't crashed, I hadn't upgraded anything. Apple - rotten to the core - had bitten me again. We are all cursed now, all living with the original sin of allowing these companies into our lives ...

For reasons I can no longer properly recall, about ten years ago I started using iTunes on my computer. I think my reasoning was something like "Oh, how convenient: I can play stuff this way, organise playlists into albums and generally organise stuff. Great!" Being a creature of habit/obsession, I've stuck with it, adding and adding to it, all the while vaguely - uneasily - aware that a crash might one day bring the whole lot tumbling down. All that labour rendered futile! And so it came to pass. It's happened before of course. The Great Easter iTunes Meltdown Disaster of 2015 was also ... bad. But not as bad. That involved the unintended removal of all my playlists, not the sudden disappearance of every single bit of music in the entire iTunes library. Yes reader, I'm still in shock.

Staring into the abyss: Niluccio on noise tries to find his iTunes music

Anyway, staring into the abyss the other night I seriously considered abandoning the whole lot - I should just ditch iTunes and look for something else. A new thing. (I was almost relieved). But, by luck (misfortune?), I discovered that - via some ridiculously fiddly rummaging around deep within the computer - I could retrieve a version of my iTunes from ... five years ago (31 March 2015 to be exact, when I apparently put Car Seat Headrest's Nervous Young Man album into the library). Yet the intervening four years and 11 months of stuff painstakingly arranged on iTunes was gone. FFS. Hmm, a dilemma. Five years of stuff still there, five years missing. Carry on or give up? Stick or twist? Naturally, being a sucker for punishment I've opted to rebuild it ... And that's the point, right? Liking music in this organise-it/organise-my-life-around-it way is a self-punishing act of a love. A death wish. No good can come of it. How ever far up the mountain-side you get, you know you're destined to descend (possibly the very fast way). No, you need Buddha-like powers of calm and self-control to deal with the ups and downs of being a music obsessive. I shall soon be travelling the country on foot discussing these matters with the people. They need to hear it from a master. Music is suffering. Especially music left in the hands of rapacious Californian technology companies ...