I had to rebuild my music library in Spotify.

I recently had a major loss and that was my PC was on the fritz and was basically unusable. The last glimmer of hope was fully factory resetting it and it actually worked. It's not perfect but is functional. But I did have to lose my entire music library in the process. I had about 24,000 songs which was roughly 130gb. I had a lot of this since mid 2000s though in 2014 I did lose a lot in a very similar situation I'm in now. I guess I should prep myself for the inevitable loss in 2034. Thankfully before it went out I managed to have Spotify scan my files and it save it into 3 playlists (because of the 10,000 song playlist cap) so at the very least I list of every single song I had. I also planned on saving some of the songs I knew would be hard to find on my Google Drive but the PC was just not cooperating by that point and I just had to eat the loss. So I did it and I had a functioning computer and no music.

So I started the arduous task of listening to every song I had and saving it to a Spotify playlist while learning and adjusting to how Spotify functioned. And today I finished. I went through the last song on the last playlist. I saved only 5,076 of those ~24,000 songs. So less daunting to go through. Still too much to scroll by leisurely to listen. I do need to get in the habit of creating more condensed playlists but that's for another time. Unfortunately along with the playlist of 5,000+ saved there is an additional playlist of 715 songs that I simply couldn't find on the platform. I genuinely thought it would be more so I am pleasantly surprised. I already started looking for them and yeah, I really regret not saving them beforehand. There are some that I can't find a trace of. Not a single Youtube upload or a snippet to be found. Lyrics sites are practically the only evidence some ever existed. There were times where I did find some songs and the source of the upload was actually myself from the past. I just so happened to post a few songs on my since deleted Tumblr and luckily someone who kept their account reblogged them at some point and I was able to save them from there. I even went through some old burned CDs to get a couple lost gems. But in looking for music I found a new appreciation and community in preserving media. I already started uploading what I've found to Archive. Of course when I actually start using the service is when it gets hacked and has been unusable for a few days now. Hopefully that whole situation resolves. But now I can breathe a sigh of relief that I no longer have that daunting task looming over me. I can finally get back to listening to same 3 songs on repeat again.