Plays: 0

I had to buy a new laptop recently because the old one was slow enough that it became an incompetent paperweight. In migrating over my iTunes library, I somehow lost the play counts for all my music.

This annoyed me, even though I know it’s a petty complaint when you are financially OK enough to just run out and buy a laptop. I feel like I worked hard on that library and the play counts were almost like a legacy. I was always curious to see how many times I had listened to the most popular songs. I feel like I’ve lost something. Sometimes I wonder how many times I’ve played my favorite songs over a lifetime that stretches back well beyond MP3s. What records, tapes or CDs have I listened to most frequently? Is that what computers have done to me: Made it impossible to tell how much I love art unless I quantify it with a number?

For the record, the final count on the old laptop was 65 plays for “All I Want” by LCD Soundsystem. The runner-up was 64 plays for Madonna’s “Ray of Light.” The listing of my most-played songs was not necessarily my favorite songs because they tended heavily toward my running playlists so there were not a lot of ballads on there.

Now I start over at zero and my library is a virgin territory of unplayed songs. Upgrading a computer is a great equalizer. Years ago it annoyed me that I hadn’t played every song on my iPod at least once so I hit “play” and listened to every song in order. It was kind of fun, if repetitive when I had several versions of the same song play back-to-back. So now I have to do that again. It will be fun again, listening to songs I rarely hear.

Yes, I still listen to music on a plain old iPod instead of a smart phone. My iPod has 160 GB of storage, 40 of which is full. I highly prize the real estate space, which seems much higher than on smart phones, and will give up this device only when it has smoke coming out of it.