Ghost Jam

Trapped somewhere within the depths of an old hard drive lives the genie of my music collection...a longtime labor of love developed over decades and included over 1500 albums...including a library within a library of long sought after New Order remixes, Smiths b-sides, Fall Peel sessions and the like.



At least for the moment, and for the immediate future, there it will remain...lost, cold and lonely.

In the meantime, I have been able to acquire a (very nice) refurbished Macbook with a wide open digital landscape of disc space available to brutally violate with whatever sounds I am able to shore up.

As it turns out, the Denver Public Library has a rather surprising number of excellent discs.

What I've realized about all of this is that to some extent I've actually been a bit trapped within my old music collection to a disturbing measure.

If there's lemon aide to be made out of this bushel of sonic lemons, it's that the experience of losing my music has forced me to branch out and dip into uncharted waters...not to mention offered me the opportunity to write mixed metaphors about it all on an online forum.

Anyway, my newfound love for Girls, Frank Zappa and J Boogie's Dubtronic Science has my lost collection to thank.

Anyone else ever experience this? And if so did you similarly find yourself open to stuff you hadn't even realized you were kinda shutting out before?

-Ghost Jam finally has posted 15 posts and can now post URL's

Blarobbarg

I've had this happen. My desktop was utterly destroyed by a virus (I think, anyway), with absolutely no way to retrieve anything. I had to wipe it clean, and since I'm a dumbass and didn't back it up I lost over 80 gigs of music, about half of it that I hadn't listened to. I was completely addicted to downloading a few albums a day, so there was no way I was ever going to get through it all. About the same time, my iPod failed for reasons I still haven't figured out, and the Auxillary jack screwed up, so even if it worked, I couldn't listen to music. It turned out to be cheaper to buy a brand new iPod than to fix it, so I just gave up.

Because of this, I went into a musical hibernation stage for awhile, and listened to almost only CD's, and only in my car. On the computer, I was forced to find some way to listen to music that would also Scrobble to my Last.FM, which led me to discovering Grooveshark, a website that lets you stream TONS of albums. Groovesark turned out to be so awesome that even though I've gotten a laptop and fixed my desktop, I still mostly use Grooveshark. But now I've been given a used 32 gig iPod touch, so I guess it's time to start "owning" digital music again.

EDIT- And on the original topic, I guess it freed up my musical tastes... I mean, I have no idea what was on my hard drive, so I just started looking at completely new, different music. So I guess when my computer was destroyed it actually made me stuck in a rut, since I had to rely only on CD's that I already owned or bought. I bought a lot of used CD's in those months.

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Ghost Jam

Ouch.

Well what happened to me was a rather involuntary episode of having to relocate, and I was especially limited on what I could take with me.

So I gutted my old HP for its hard drive so that I'd at least still have the music for when the dust settled.

I ran across a guy that was able to lift the iTunes folder and install it all onto my brand new MacBook Pro, and life was happy and rainbows again.

Then my apartment was burglarized and I hadn't uploaded the library onto "the cloud" (still not entirely certain how to do that or what that even means, but whatever) and my Mac was among the items burgled.

Life returned to darkness and sadness.

By then I had lost contact with "guy who could get my music from the hard drive to the Mac"...and I no longer had a Mac to put it on anyway.

So, I still have the drive, sitting right here in my drawer, and I once again have a cpu to put the music on, just no one with the knowledge to make it happen.

Perhaps someone here can shed light onto this and help me unleash the genie...

At any rate I'm having a lot of fun zoning in on new stuff at the moment, so it's not TOTAL sadness and pain...but sooner or later I'm REALLY gonna wanna get my stuff stuff type music back in my arms again.

-Long Winded Ghost Jam

Trollheart

Well I'm an oldy, so my music collection began (and to some extent, mostly remains) on vinyl, where the only damage a computer can do to it is if you throw one on top of it, then CDs, again the same. When online music was born (remember Audiogalaxy? Ah, those were the days...) I began downloading and quickly realised that one copy of this music I had obtained, at the time for nothing, would never do.

So I made a backup. Then a backup of the backup. Then a backup of the backup of the backup. I took one backup into work, left it in my desk drawer. I made a point of uploading another backup to my website. Just to be sure, I made another backup and put it away. You can never have enough backups.

As to your question about the drive, why can't you just hook it up to the IDE or SATA cable on your new PC and use it, or at least copy off what you need? What exactly happened to it?

Oh, and one final word, which I almost forgot and haven't mentioned once here, but it's important.

Backup.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Zer0

I don't understand why more people don't backup their music collection. It's just common sense at this stage. I have a large portion of my digital collection on my computer and two backups of my entire collection on two external HDs. So even the HD on my computer gets messed up I still have two backups at the ready. If one of my external HDs fails then I can just buy a new one and make another backup. It's highly unlikely that all three will fail at the same time.

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Ghost Jam

Yes, I am a foolish ******* for not backing up the music.

A mistake that won't be made twice.

For what it's worth, the music is all still there...it's just gonna be a headache to retrieve

-Ghost Jam

Rjinn

I started off with a computer 9 years ago which was my store centre for music. 60 gigs of potential discovery through other forums that exposed and completely changed my music taste from mainstream commercial music to music with a lot more substance. 2 years later, it blew up but I had somehow mustered enough CD records to keep me going. Thanks to the connection, I was able to pick the CDs I wanted and I'm ever so glad I did as it became my back up to years worth of discovery. Literally I bought a CD a day for a year. Then life turned upside down.

For a while, I'd be lucky to get a CD a week. Had no capability to afford a computer that sufficiently could handle downloading music and with very limited access. I've been discovering music and piling up probably over a thousand albums just by this one device called the iPhone. The only link I've got. Almost losing most of my CD collection, the only thing I had left, I was on the verge of giving up. I'm glad it didn't turn out that way. Hopefully next year now I've moved to a different territory it'll all get back up again.

I'd also like to credit this forum. It has kept me going through my music journey with what little routes I have at the moment. I'm so greatful.

Music banter love all the way!

Freebase Dali

Easy.
If the hard drive came from a laptop, it's a 2.5 inch drive, in which case you'll need a 2.5" external enclosure. These cost less than 10 bucks on Amazon. If it came from a desktop, you're looking at a 3.5 inch drive, so the enclosure will need to be 3.5.
As far as the interface itself, it will most likely be SATA. But if it's an old drive, it might be IDE. The simplest way to figure this out is to look at the connector portion of the drive.

If the connection looks like this:

It's SATA. Don't mind the hard drive itself. That's a 2.5 inch for laptops. The connectors are the same regardless of the drive's physical size, but pay attention to the actual pin layout. 3.5 inch drives have their connections set different, but the pinout is the same. You'll generally see an "L" shape on a SATA, along with a smaller, separate connector.

If the connection doesn't look like that, it's IDE.

Having looked at your drive and figured out whether it's SATA or IDE (You can probably also find this information on the sticker atop it), you now have all the information you need to make a purchase of an enclosure.

An enclosure will let you put the drive in it, then connect it to your new computer via USB. It's EXACTLY the same thing as an external hard drive. All external hard drives are, are simply regular hard drives in an enclosure that has a SATA or IDE interface that goes to USB.

So, assuming you go to Amazon or Newegg or somewhere and get the cheapest enclosure you can find, ensuring that it's either SATA or IDE, as per your drive specifications, and assuming you get either 2.5 or 3.5 inch, as per whether you have a laptop hard drive or a desktop hard drive, then you simply put it together, plug it in to a USB port on your new computer, (you might have to use both USB connectors, depending on how much power your computer sends through the particular USB port, but most enclosures will come with two connectors) and simply navigate to the external drive via the operating system and copy everything over.

This whole process would cost you a few dollars and a couple minutes, not including the time it would take to actually transfer all your music over.

Enjoy.

Trollheart

Like we both said, it seems an easy solution. But surely he could also just hook up the drive loose via the SATA/IDE cable without needing an enclosure? I've done this on occasions, just to get the data off the drive and then trashed the physical unit. Either way will work I guess, I just wonder why it's seen as such a big job to him? Are we missing something?

Also, the SATA cables on the PC are usually blue, just so you know, and narrower than the IDE ones...

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

LadyGagas

I found out, htat I rarely use my collection, instead I'm listening to new stuff continuously. Amazing, the streamm of the new never stops.