Home, sweet iPod

Guys hate moving. Any guy who’s ever had to pack up all his earthly belongings and lug them to a new place knows it’s hellish: the sweat, the strain, the heavy lifting. Then the unpacking, the arranging. Then, once everything is in place, the wife or the girlfriend wants this moved here, that moved there.

No wonder, around the age of 30, men start getting sedentary. We never want to move again. After a certain point, it’s impossible to get us off the sofa, let alone into a moving van.

Much the same applies to getting a new iPod. As users of this popular MP3 player are aware, moving your precious music collection to a new home can be a grueling experience. That’s because, unlike most MP3 players, the iPod doesn’t easily allow you to back up or copy its contents. The musical jukebox program iTunes – which allows you to manage your music, download Podcasts and import your CDs – won’t let you copy the songs from your iPod elsewhere once it’s plugged in.

Apple probably prefers it this way to cut down on copyright infringement – if everybody’s iPod could be hooked up together, it would surely cut into the millions in sales enjoyed by iTune’s Music Store. But for a long time, this has been a real teeth-gnasher for Apple users.

I used to dread that coming day – "the day the music died," as Don McLean would put it. When an iPod is nearing death – say because the battery’s permanently draining and you can’t figure out how to change it without sacrificing your songs – there is the mad scramble to reassemble your CD collection. Stacks and stacks of CDs litter your desk, your office, your bedroom, in no particular order, as you prepare to import everything all over again.

But there are ways around this dilemma. Fortunately, there are programs – now available over the Internet – that will let you copy your entire iPod library onto your hard disk. One pretty straightforward program that functions with few glitches is called PodWorks (available only for Macs, sadly). The free shareware version is limited to 30 days’ use, and you can only transfer 250 songs at a time. But the registered version costs the equivalent of P400, so it’s really a bargain. After you plug your old iPod into the Apple computer, PodWorks will ask you to select the songs (or the entire library) that you want to copy. You can even copy whole playlists – those lovingly created personalized sub-lists of music such as "Lively" (for live music), "Progged" (for progressive rock bands), "Fused" (for jazz rock) and "Velvety" (for bands that sound like the Velvet Underground). The best part is: no more importing those CDs all over again, and wearing out your CD disk drive. As long as you have enough available memory space, I’s that simple.

But of course, for some guys, simplicity is just too simple.

Since moving to a bigger, better iPod recently (a 30-gigger with video), I’ve been obsessed with restoring my "perfect" song selection from the old iPod, with all the bells and whistles. Since I had about 2,900 songs to load, this led to some really obsessive, anal behavior on my part.

I should mention this is one of the few areas of my life where I’m completely obsessive and anal. Making the bed, putting away clothes, upgrading my cell phone ringtone or washing the car regularly – these things don’t matter much to me. But when it comes to what I put between my ears, I’m a perfectionist (albeit a subjective one). Building up the right iPod library takes months, even years. It requires careful crafting, and judicious song choice.

Now, I know a lot of people who are not choosy when it comes to loading their iPods. They’ll just slop all the songs in there with as much care and attention as a cafeteria serving lady. Mixed genres? Wrong spellings? Who cares?

Well, I care. More than I should, really. Maybe it has to do with being an editor, but I find it impossible to put up with typos on my iPod. Weird and obsessive, I know. As most of us are aware, there is a company called Gracenote that automatically provides our CDs with track listings, times, artists and album information when we’re hooked up to the Net. But it’s not really automatic – all that stuff is input by people, who make countless keystroke mistakes. They mean well, but they often misspell things. Or leave out punctuation. Or they get the names of albums wrong. Or they classify music as "Electronica" when it’s clearly "Ambient." Little things like that.

Little things that can drive the iPod-obsessed bats**t.

How anal do I get? Well, my old iPod had close to 3,000 songs, or about 10 straight days of continuous music. And yet, I was eerily aware of every single song in that library. This meant that, if I set the iPod to Shuffle, and happened to come across even a single track that strikes my ear as removable, I would scribble down a note to delete it at the earliest convenient time.

That’s because, on some twisted level, I knew the offending song would just keep turning up like a bad penny, bothering my sense of musical flow. Yes, this is messed up, maybe even a little sick. But I was a DJ in college; segues are important to me.

So ask me if spending countless hours "managing" my iPod is excessive, and I’m apt to get a little defensive. Hey, you might say, isn’t that kind of like those people who get addicted to online gaming? You know, the ones who lose their jobs, have to move to countries without broadband to avoid getting hooked again, or simply keel over at their desks because they can’t stop playing?

Yeah, maybe. But those people are losers.

This is music we’re talking about. Things like this matter, to the music fanatic. Take musical categories. Does the Jaco Pastorius bass solo Slang, off the Weather Report album "8:30," belong under "Jaco," or under "Weather Report"? Is Dead Can Dance considered "Alternative & Punk," as Gracenote would classify it, or is it better placed under "World Music"? And how do you make that funny little umlaut over the "o" in Björk’s name?

Then there’s the matter of album artwork (for those with iPod Photo or Video). This can take the iPod obsessive into new realms of dementia, tracking down JPEGs of their favorite CD covers and filing them under the correct songs. All this so you can have a square-centimeter image of the CD artwork on your iPod screen. But maybe, for the iPod enthusiast, it’s the equivalent of getting that vintage Bally pinball machine or pool table or wine cooler situated in your new apartment. It’s the special touches that make your place truly yours.

So, okay: my desk itself may be a pigsty. My coffee mug may have seen cleaner days. My car may be grimy and mud-stained since rainy season began. But my iPod has almost reached that state of Zen perfection that Steve Jobs must have had in mind when he designed the damned thing in the first place.

And that makes moving all over again almost worth it, somehow.