I have been having some technology woes thrust upon me this week. First, my DVR kept corrupting my recorded shows and spontaneously turning off and on. Then, my 3.5 year-old Asus eeePad Transformer Android tablet is getting old and cranky to such a degree I am considering a replacement. The most tragic event though, and one that will now create a lot more work for me happened three days ago with my 6-year-old iPod Touch.

My iPod Touch is my main music player on foot, in the car and at work. It contains 7.5 days worth of songs. It is not unheard of to walk by my office and hear some Steely Dan or Zeppelin playing faintly as I quietly do my work. The other day was no exception. I plugged in my iPod Touch to my workstation and fired up iTunes. Everything went as planned – all my music from my iPod loaded in iTunes. I randomly chose a song to start the shuffle – AC/DC’s Let’s Get It Up. I sang to the song under my breath while doing some data file management. The song ended, and I expected the next song to fire up…but nothing happened!

I looked up to find that iTunes was trying to play any song on my iPod, but couldn’t find anything to play. It replaced every song with a tiny exclamation point in front! What is this madness?? I randomly picked a song from further down the list. An exclamation point appeared in front of that song! Eventually, iTunes was showing every song from my iPod as having an exclamation point!

I checked with the iPod. It indicated there was no music on it! This was confusing to me as iTunes showed there was music on the device. Eventually, by restarting the iPod and reinstalling iTunes, songs reappeared on my iPod, but they were all ghosted. I couldn’t play any of them – only erase them.

Apple forums indicated what happened was the music files somehow became corrupted. But, no explanation as to why that happened, other than “these things just happen! Time for a factory reset of your iPod…We’re sorry!”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Shit!

So, I did just that – a factory reset of my 6-year-old iPod Touch. It’s functional now, almost like new, actually.

No apps on there, no music. A clean slate. 7.5 days worth of music (19 Gb), gone. With tragedy, however, there comes a new beginning. One way to force me to assess my current music collection and perhaps add some fresh music to my stale listening roster is by clearing out the music – by will or by force – and starting over.

I tried loading music on the iPod, but quickly realized I didn’t have any music that I could quickly load onto it to make sure it’s working. A little fact: I have never bought any music from the iTunes store, which meant, I’d have to load music by computer… Except, there was that album I got for free in the iTunes store last year…you know…that album everyone complained about…

So, I listened to U2’s Songs of Innocence on the ride into work yesterday. All things considered, everything worked, and I got to listen to some of the songs from this album I liked.

Time to load more music onto this iPod. I am not even sure I still have all the music I had originally on there in digital format any more…if not, it’s to the bins of CDs…

That’s BINSSSS…I guess I better get rippin’.

Music keeps me alive, but what happens when the device I use to keep me alive breaks? 7.5 days worth of music. That is a lot of music. Maybe AC/DC corrupted my iPod (here’s hoping \m/)?