Apple have an awful lot to answer for...

It’s 8pm. I know it’s 8pm because I’ve been staring at the time for the last fifty seconds, ever since 7:59, when I started.

Watching a clock tick is worth the effort, it’s stopping me from starting something that I’ve been putting off for a while.

But I can put it off no more.

It’s time to transfer i-tunes.

My old PC is slowly dying and running out of steam – don’t be sad, it’s had a good innings but the world no longer loves Windows 2000 and my computer’s memory is fading fast, is it one Gig or two? Who can remember?

Before I can send my faithful old PC out to pasture and place him lovingly into the loft with all the other crap that I refuse to throw away/sell/charity/admit to still having, I have a job to do.

Music has been a somewhat complicated affair since some bright-spark decided that the CD’s, which they had made me buy because the cassettes that I had replaced all my LP’s with, had gone out of fashion and that anyone with trousers worth ripping off had an ipod instead. 

What was wrong with taping the top 40 off the radio anyway? So what if the start and end of every song had some chump talking over it but who cared? You were bang up to date with the latest tunes, could copy it to play on other devices, could carry it about to listen to on the train and could easily mix it about to knock up your own special playlist mix-tapes that you could give to a special lady who would usually dump you the next day.

 Music was easy.

One day, several years ago, I joined the digital revolution and spent a lifetime figuring out how to put my “Who”, “Spear of Destiny”, “The The” and “S-Club 7” collections onto it via my computer. Oh don’t laugh, everyone has something embarrassingly shameful and indulgent on their ipod, with me it’s The The.

Somewhere along the line, I’ve just discovered, I decided to use my work email as the log-in for my i-tunes account.

The work email that is about four years out of date now.

That’s the one.

With the password that is nearly, but not quite, the one I usually use.

That’s the one.

 I knew that this job was going to be lengthy.

Authorizing a new computer is step one and according to the help texts takes about four seconds. It does if you can log in without it happening automatically in the background for you. When you actually have to know your account name and password it suddenly becomes interesting.

Do I want to email myself a new password? What, to an email address that wouldn’t even work now if I still worked at my old company – which I don’t? Hmmm – better keep guessing then.

Eventually, I stumble onto the right credentials and my buzzing new laptop has the power to access my songs.

Except it doesn’t because I still haven’t actually transferred the music, just the rights to play it, it seems.

So another hour skips idly by as I seek out the actual media files and copy them over to an external drive only to copy them again to the new computer. I have at least got a little savvy now by leaving them grouped in a single folder and backed up on the external so things should be easier next time.

Next time?

Like I’m ever doing this again!

Midnight.

I do believe I’m done.

My new computer has playlists (that was a shocker – you export and import the library but then have to do the playlists separately). The playlists point to tracks that it can actually find.

It works.

Bed.

Feeling somewhat cocky and confident, the next day, I buy some new tracks and plug in the ipod.

Three hours later….

It seems my ipod had to delete everything and rebuild itself to the new PC.

It seems it didn’t like it very much.

Everything has gone and the ipod is not responding.

What was so bad about vinyl again?