I've had my 60GB iPod since 2005 and have easily used it more than any other gadget I've ever owned. Countless CD's, DJ sets, pop songs etc on there (about 40 gig in total).

On Sunday night I added a new set to it ([url="http://www.mercuryserver.com/forums/djdb.php?id=132"]Homegrove[/url]'s latest from Soundcloud actually), and then disconnected it from iTunes as usual. All my music was on the device at that time.

Got in my car on Monday morning, went to play the set and discovered there is nothing on my iPod at all - it's all gone. Not one single track - all the playlists have disappeared. 7 years of great DJ sets, mix CD's etc just like that.

To say I am gutted is an understatement :(

95% of the mix CD's that were on there I still have the original CDs of, but not so for the countless Kiss [url="http://www.mercuryserver.com/forums/djdb.php?id=1509"]FM[/url] mixes, essential mixes, metrodance sets etc. I had so much on there I actually didnt know what I had on there if you know what I mean.

Before anyone asks, I didnt back any of it up. Only in the past year did I purchase an external hard drive, and there is some stuff on there at least. But prior to this, I would DL a set to my laptop, transfer it to iTunes and then put it onto the iPod - and then I would delete it from the laptop/iTunes to make space.

There is a LOT to be said for tangible music products!!!!

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

this happens to everyone at some point m8, look on it as a lesson

the trouble with most devices like ipods etc are that the memory that's built inside of it can only last so long then its useless, they are just like ssd'd

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Rule Nº 1

You have to record all your music on a cd. no matter what, if it is important for you, record it. sometimes the technology has these fucking problems.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Sorry to hear that mate... same shit happened to me not a long time ago, 120gb gone..

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

So sorry.

What was the last file you added, again?

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Horrible feeling, i try and back everything up at least twice :lol:

It all comes in handy at some point! ;)

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[QUOTE=GarryX;1055169]Horrible feeling, i try and back everything up at least twice :lol:

It all comes in handy at some point! ;)[/QUOTE]

you must have a lot of ginger midget porn :lol:

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

I have loads and loads of mixes and stuff, terabytes, if you can tell me (more or less) what you've lost, I'll send you an HD full of replacement files. Don't be shy!

[video=youtube;XaCoUZo5I0o]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaCoUZo5I0o[/video]

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[QUOTE=thebanned1;1055182]you must have a lot of ginger midget porn :lol:[/QUOTE]

As i said, it all comes in handy at some point :lol:

[QUOTE=sbando;1055183]I have loads and loads of mixes and stuff, terabytes, if you can tell me (more or less) what you've lost, I'll send you an HD full of replacement files. Don't be shy! [/QUOTE]

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Damn... sorry to hear that Greg :( Been through that before but not near that extent, I feel for ya.

I've been meaning to transfer everything off my TimeCapsule onto DVD's because I simply don't trust the thing to last longer than 10+ years.. this may have just given me a very good reason to do so.. but damn.. 149GB I have, going to take a while.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Cds don't last forever either. We are discovering the drawbacks to the digital age. :(

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[QUOTE=ddr;1055189]

I've been meaning to transfer everything off my TimeCapsule onto DVD's because I simply don't trust the thing to last longer than 10+ years.. this may have just given me a very good reason to do so.. but damn.. 149GB I have, going to take a while.[/QUOTE]

So true.. Is it naive thinking that eventually everything will be online at some point? Used to love to dl and have my fav stuff backed up but since my last crash i kinda give up on the whole idea

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[QUOTE=DIDI;1055197]Cds don't last forever either. We are discovering the drawbacks to the digital age. :([/QUOTE]

If people decided not to invest in brand DVD and CD blanks, they're in for an unpleasant surprise.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Mine are Taiyo Yuden., But you can still get playable shellac 78's in your local op shop , I doubt we will be able to say that of cds. The same goes for photography . Well stored film will last for a very, very long time and one of the photo print media I used to use had a lifespan of 100 years plus.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

True story. Cheap media and casual storing mean you already lost your data.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[COLOR=#66cccc][FONT=Tahoma]

since some days

my dvd´s backups are not anymore in this planet

I have some music on last years backups [external hard drives etc]

but those dvds where infinitely important more than anything because Hernán !! Doors !! and Howells !!

didi .. talking in real words

can we together start a brand new quality hernán metrodance thread ??

I mean is this possible ?? .. I´m for this, in slow mode but I´m here

thinking now, I had so much music there that .............. ....

... just fuck you shitty empty people fuck you in every way

[/FONT][/COLOR]

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Mine is on external, laptop and cut to disc just in case and I have a friend who has done the same with most of the same music I listen to so fingers crossed I'm safe for now.

Greg and Garry so sorry to hear I would be gutted - hope you can restore most

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

i have some gems on cd's and is always good when ipod crashes and i find them, then i got an external hard drive, but my mac made it its bitch and the hard drive wont work with any other computer, so destiny is still in hands of my laptop...

i say to people that lost there stuff that its okay, consider it a filtering process, now u will have and acquire again the best of the best and what truly stuck in memory and needed, and im sure many here wont mind re-upping anything u need if we have it ;)

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[QUOTE=Hoff;1055231][COLOR=#66cccc][FONT=Tahoma]

since some days

my dvd´s backups are not anymore in this planet

I have some music on last years backups [external hard drives etc]

but those dvds where infinitely important more than anything because Hernán !! Doors !! and Howells !!

didi .. talking in real words

can we together start a brand new quality hernán metrodance thread ??

I mean is this possible ?? .. I´m for this, in slow mode but I´m here

thinking now, I had so much music there that .............. ....

... just fuck you shitty empty people fuck you in every way

[/FONT][/COLOR][/QUOTE] MS still have the archive I think. Haven't looked for a few days. :) But I have them all and a couple more :) I'm quite happy to burn Dvds and send them to you. I have quite a bit of Danny as well.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[QUOTE=trick12;1055237]i have some gems on cd's and is always good when ipod crashes and i find them, then i got an external hard drive, but my mac made it its bitch and the hard drive wont work with any other computer, so destiny is still in hands of my laptop...

i say to people that lost there stuff that its okay, consider it a filtering process, now u will have and acquire again the best of the best and what truly stuck in memory and needed, and im sure many here wont mind re-upping anything u need if we have it ;)[/QUOTE] You should be able to use as an external with other computers?? I have three different drives that have been in other computers and I am using them as externals. One I took out of an old g4. It's in a usb case. works fine.

I think I might start burning the collections to DVD though and storing very very carefully.

Btw You are right about reevaluating and only having the best , worked that way for me.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Back up your back ups. That's what I've learnt over the years.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

dvds only stand for -/+ 5 years. Be careful with that. You burn them down, and in a couple of yeras when you want to read some data from them, they won´t work properly. CDs have even a shorter life, once burnt.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Greg, was it the legacy white iPod? I had one that did the exact same thing, transferred some tunes to it, disconnected it, sat in the car heading out of town, the thing is blank. It was a horrid feeling. I have the last gen 160 gb ipod but I have started making a habit of keeping a full backup of the ipod on an external now (just in case). To make the backup more useful, I bought a cheap pair of logitechs with a bitchin sub and started listening to music more when I'm working in my study, so it motivates me even more to take regular backups so I can listen to the newest tunes I've put on my iPod.

Honestly, don't try to put your music back on this ipod, it'll do it twice (it's done it to me). And if you will get a new digital media player, move away from Hard Drive based ones. The flash drive based iPod Touch 5 is scheduled for announcement on Sept 12, alongwith the new iPhone. It'll be a worthy update and should be a lot more secure with your data.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Sorry to hear that Greg - i think we've all lost music at one stage or another

Heres a question: I also have a tonne of music on my ipod classic - i have an external HD for time machine on my mbp

How do i backup the music on my ipod to the external HD?

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

I briefly owned an MBP, if your music is saved on the HD of your MBP, time machine will automatically backup everything to the external.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[QUOTE=diegoff;1055261]dvds only stand for -/+ 5 years. Be careful with that. You burn them down, and in a couple of yeras when you want to read some data from them, they won´t work properly. CDs have even a shorter life, once burnt.[/QUOTE]

Really ??? fuck ....

I have all my music recorded onto I dont know how many dvds. and cds, never had a problem with that. but now you mention it. I think it is more safe than the softwares or some internal memory or the own mac or pc. at least, to keep files for long.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

CD's have lasted 10+ years for me... I've heard others say to Clint in the past when he tried to give away 100's of cd's that they weren't any good, but even since then my blank cd's that I've burned work fine. I keep them in a dark place, maybe that helps?

Pretty soon all of our files will be stored digitally online, on a sugarsync type database, the storage space will be free and all of our systems will connect to it. If we don't already.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[QUOTE=trick12;1055237]i say to people that lost there stuff that its okay, consider it a filtering process, now u will have and acquire again the best of the best and what truly stuck in memory and needed, and im sure many here wont mind re-upping anything u need if we have it ;)[/QUOTE]

Very good advice... cause really, there are Tons of mixes that I download and only listen to a few of them at the most... so to that effect I have tried filtering as I go to kind of help with that, and it cuts down on what I have on my Time Capsule... which is already 149 GB music alone.

[QUOTE=floridaorange;1055293]CD's have lasted 10+ years for me... I've heard others say to Clint in the past when he tried to give away 100's of cd's that they weren't any good, but even since then my blank cd's that I've burned work fine. I keep them in a dark place, maybe that helps?

Pretty soon all of our files will be stored digitally online, on a sugarsync type database, the storage space will be free and all of our systems will connect to it. If we don't already.[/QUOTE]

I agree Florida, I still have burnt CD's from early 2000-2002 which continue to be read and I can still extract music from them. Just like you said, I keep all of my music CD's/DVD's in caselogic CD cases, so they are never pressured or in sunlight in any way.

Until I can invest in something a little more permanent--also since Broadband Internet (at least in the States) still hasnt reached the upload speed that could warrant me changing to online backups. Finally, who is to say that Dropbox or Google Drive will still be around in 10+ years.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Guys, really appreciate all the heartfelt messages, kudos to you all.

Kamal - think it's the 5th gen video iPod I have. It's the one that was heavily endorsed by U2 when it came out (they were in the advert). I always knew it would screw up one day, like all technology inevitably does.

As people have said, it does mean when I come to DL all the music again from various sources, I will only DL those extra special tracks and sets. The annoying part is that I frequently will cut out a track from a DJ set and put it in a separate playlist (sometimes I dont want to listen to the whole set or its the only great track in the set). Now I have to do that all again, and I'll never remember what I had and what I didnt have!

Lesson learned I suppose. Thank god I have been saving to a HD for the past 12 months at least; I should still have a good amount of stuff on there that I can transfer to any new iPod that I purchase.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[QUOTE=sbando;1055183]I have loads and loads of mixes and stuff, terabytes, if you can tell me (more or less) what you've lost, I'll send you an HD full of replacement files. Don't be shy![/QUOTE]

you da man Sbando :)

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

btw Greg, I haven't tried this, but connect your iPod to your computer, when the iPod appears in My Computer, open the folder, enable viewing of hidden folders and then go into the Music folder and see if anything is visible in it. If not, go to recuva.net, download the program and run a recovery on the iPod and see if it finds your music. If that still doesn't, download and install a program such as GetDataBack and then try to recover the files.

Good luck.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

^along a similar vein, I honestly didn't know my mac had a "music" folder that has kept every mix I have ever downloaded until recently. So the music, even though deleted on my itunes, was still stored in a "music" folder. Kind of nice to revisit mixes I had tossed out.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[QUOTE=floridaorange;1055338]^along a similar vein, I honestly didn't know my mac had a "music" folder that has kept every mix I have ever downloaded until recently. So the music, even though deleted on my itunes, was still stored in a "music" folder. Kind of nice to revisit mixes I had tossed out.[/QUOTE]

In itunes advanced preferences, there is a checkbox that, if checked, it will copy any mp3's added to your library to that folder.. so, in effect, you have 2 copies--the one you downloaded and the one itunes automatically copied.

I have always organized my itunes myself just to cut down on wasted space and slowing down of the computer but I can see the advantages for a 2nd, especially if it was hosted on megaupload.com haha

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Went into music folder and there is something there - lots of stuff actually. 49 folders from F01 to F49.

Within each one, there are lots of different MPEG-4 files and MP3 files but they all have weird names - all 4 characters long. e.g. GMII, GPGP, NYEW etc.

I can open the MP3 files in windows media player and the file plays - and they are tracks that were on the iPod. I havent opened the MPEG-4 files yet as it will open iTunes and I dont want to do that whilst the iPod is connected.

??

[QUOTE=Kamal;1055331]btw Greg, I haven't tried this, but connect your iPod to your computer, when the iPod appears in My Computer, open the folder, enable viewing of hidden folders and then go into the Music folder and see if anything is visible in it. If not, go to recuva.net, download the program and run a recovery on the iPod and see if it finds your music. If that still doesn't, download and install a program such as GetDataBack and then try to recover the files.

Good luck.[/QUOTE]

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Well then you sound like you're in luck, all your music appears to be intact, the weird filenames is iTunes butchering the naming scheme. If you're lucky, all of the metadata/ID3 tags are still intact.

Right click on the Music folder and see it's size, it should show you the correct number of files (songs) and how many gigs it is, giving you an idea of the extent of the songs still on the iPod.

if you have an external drive, copy and paste the entire MUSIC folder asap, from your iPod to the external drive. That will (all going well) copy all your music files off your iPod to a new location (i.e. back up your iPod). Thereafter, create a new playlist (call it backup) in iTunes and drag and drop the entire music folder from your backup location (on the external drive) into the newly created playlist. That way you can test to see if all your music is intact it.

This will also (if the ID3 tags didn't get fucked because of the iPod crash) display all the available track info in itunes.

If it got ruined, you can recover it using a program such as TuneUp. Now that might not work for DJ Sets but will work for ALL commercially available music (including DJ mixes from series such as Balance, GU etc.).

If the messed up file names bother you, then once you have fixed the ID3 tags, you can use a program such getsharepod to put all the files back onto the iPod and then copy them back down using one of the preset naming schemes and that will also fix the messed up filenames.

Good luck!

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[QUOTE=GregWhelan;1055398]Went into music folder and there is something there - lots of stuff actually. 49 folders from F01 to F49.

Within each one, there are lots of different MPEG-4 files and MP3 files but they all have weird names - all 4 characters long. e.g. GMII, GPGP, NYEW etc.

I can open the MP3 files in windows media player and the file plays - and they are tracks that were on the iPod. I havent opened the MPEG-4 files yet as it will open iTunes and I dont want to do that whilst the iPod is connected.

??[/QUOTE]

You could try adding that folder into your library in i-tunes : you can then play the tracks from there.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

Kamal has already explained it, the files are there, with those silly scrambled names (thank you, Steve). Tags are there, there are many apps in Win that can name a file after its tags (a million of them, even in batch mode) so a friend with a PC might be of help.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

i dont get it. ipod died. how does that make you lose the music that you uploaded from your computer? shouldnt you just be able to buy a new ipod and connect it to your itunes?

btw my ipod was stolen a couple of years back and havent messed with itunes since. what i did was use google play. i uploaded 60gb worth of my music and now have access to it anywhere i have an internet connection, including my phone. screw itunes. its all on the cloud now. i do still keep all of my music based out of an external hard drive as a hard copy backup.

i would seriously die if somehow i lost all of my music.

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

^now we're talkin

Re: 7 years of music....gone :(

[QUOTE=Kamal;1055407]Well then you sound like you're in luck, all your music appears to be intact, the weird filenames is iTunes butchering the naming scheme. If you're lucky, all of the metadata/ID3 tags are still intact.

Right click on the Music folder and see it's size, it should show you the correct number of files (songs) and how many gigs it is, giving you an idea of the extent of the songs still on the iPod.

if you have an external drive, copy and paste the entire MUSIC folder asap, from your iPod to the external drive. That will (all going well) copy all your music files off your iPod to a new location (i.e. back up your iPod). Thereafter, create a new playlist (call it backup) in iTunes and drag and drop the entire music folder from your backup location (on the external drive) into the newly created playlist. That way you can test to see if all your music is intact it.

This will also (if the ID3 tags didn't get fucked because of the iPod crash) display all the available track info in itunes.

If it got ruined, you can recover it using a program such as TuneUp. Now that might not work for DJ Sets but will work for ALL commercially available music (including DJ mixes from series such as Balance, GU etc.).

If the messed up file names bother you, then once you have fixed the ID3 tags, you can use a program such getsharepod to put all the files back onto the iPod and then copy them back down using one of the preset naming schemes and that will also fix the messed up filenames.

Good luck![/QUOTE]

Very good idea Kamal... now I remember doing this to my old 1st gen iPod and seeing the GWR4G names but ID3 tags in tact... dont know how I didnt think of this but I am glad you did.

Sounds like you are in Luck Greg... just gotta copy everything then rename now, which will undoubtedly take a long time but better than losing everything like you thought you did. :)