Music Is Your Time Capsule

I am a music freak. Like most people my age, I can hardly go any where without having my entire collection of music at hand. Thanks to technology we can do this, at a reasonable price. My 30G iPod Video holds all my music, some videos, and backs up some old photos to boot and it only cost me about $250 two years ago.

Even though Apple is a huge ass and makes it hard for users to copy stuff OFF the iPod, iTunes is still a pretty awesome media player. The iTunes store and Amazon MP3 integration built into iTunes makes buying and playing MP3s easy and convenient. Even though you have other choices in media players (I also like Winamp I used it before iTunes came along my freshman year) that offer the same features, there is just something really simple about iTunes.

One cool thing I've noticed about iTunes is its capacity to serve as a time capsule for your life. When you enable the "Date Added" category column in your library you suddenly can track back through time. For example, if you and your best friend went on a road trip back during Fall 2004, you two probably downloaded some kick ass songs to make a sweet playlist. Or you went through a really heart smashing breakup that one summer and was hopelessly devoted to Taking Back Sunday. By sorting your songs with the "Date Added" feature, you can go back and look at what you listened to. You see, we forget a lot of things! Some times its really awesome to be reminded of how music touched and possibly even shaped our lives. There lies a little, subtle, story in that data. It's really quite neat!

In effort to not lose this information to a iPod crash, like what happened to my iPod mini back senior year. I decided to immortalize (digitally) my iPod data. Thanks to Google spreadsheets I am even able to publish it to the web. See it here! You can also see my music collection and be inspired!

I encourage all of you to back up your data, whether it be iPod data or just important things in your life. The Internet is such a wonderful thing and allows us to organize our lives in ways we only imagined a few years ago. Google in particular has made the transition to a digital life easier than ever.

For those who know me, really check out the list. It's at some parts kinda funny!