After basically spending two days flat on my back, I wanted to do something. “Hey,” I thought to myself, “I can add the CDs I’ve acquired in the last year or so to my music catalog!”
Way back in the Dark… that is, the DOS Ages, I registered a little piece of software called Playlist. Its sole purpose was to allow one to efficiently catalog one’s music collection. There were other catalog programs out there, but Playlist was dirt easy: It stored every previous entry for each field, so adding new media from the same artist (for instance) could be accomplished with a minimum of keystrokes. I put 154 CDs into that thing… and the reason I know the exact number will be explained shortly.
Eventually Playlist “went Windows” and earned a new name: Visitrax. Because registered users of the old program could run the full version of the new without paying a second fee, I happily made the transition and hurriedly entered the other 150-some-odd CDs in my collection.
With all of the excitement this past year, somehow I lost track of my Visitrax install. More importantly, I lost track of my old Playlist install directory… in which I had a text file containing the registration code! Eep! I looked on all four of the household computers, I searched through old email archives, and poked around on the various backup CDs. Nope. Somehow when I transitioned to the new PC I managed to leave my only copies of Playlist and Visitrax behind. Damn!
Finally, in desperation, I decided to attach every IDE drive on my shelf to one of the computers to see if I could salvage something from this mess. On (of course) the very last drive in the pile, I found what I was looking for: The Playlist directory with the registration code and (bonus!) the most-recent database… from when I was using Playlist.
Oh well. At least I have those 154 CDs entered in. That only leaves about 200 and some-odd to go… and this time, I’m making more intelligent backups. Argh.
By the way, if you’re at all inclined towards building a catalog of your music, I highly recommend Visitrax. The current version pulls data from CDDB (freedb, actually) for you, and also integrates with Winamp by allowing you to associate a track with its digital version if it’s on your hard drive.