Download Problems

After 7 years of (almost) faultless service, my old computer has finally given up the ghost. In the last few weeks the mouse has formed the incredibly irritating habit of freezing on me and the hard drive has sounded like a chainsaw negotiating a slab of concrete, so I thought it time to treat myself to a new model. Ergo, I am now the proud owner of a shiny new black box. Never did like laptops.

I hate setting up new hardware; it is such a pain in the butt getting printers to work, re-installing software and transferring data. Having said that, Windows7 does a reasonably good job of setting up peripherals so all was going swimmingly until I moved all my music files over. It was only then that I found most of my downloaded songs either required re-licensing or just expired on the spot. Great! Luckily I had burned all the purchased albums to disc but I never bothered with the odd songs so they are now lost and I can’t be bothered to clutter up my brand new machine with a whole load of old applications from sites I don’t visit anymore (or just don’t exist now) just to re-licence a few songs (Interestingly those bought from Amazon and the dreaded iTunes work perfectly).

So having sat down with a list of about 30 songs I’d accumulated over the years in order to decide what to do, it became apparent that my download file has taken over from my old cassette tapes back at the dawn of time. In my taping days, I’d copy everything that sounded interesting and this inexorably became a sort of ‘buffer zone’ between the real world and my ‘proper collection’ (i.e. LPs). After a period of assimilation, I’d either buy the LP or just delete the tape. And so it came to pass that this is what has now happened to my downloads.

Many of the songs on the list have already been superseded by the album from whence they came and are thus redundant. And frankly, the majority of the rest I can live without so at the end of the day I decided to re-purchase about half a dozen of them (from Amazon) and just ignore the rest - this on the basis that if I’d liked them enough, I would’ve upgraded them to full album status by now.

Seems my weeding out process has just moved with the times.