Have you had any "music tragedies"?

Question

Jeremy posted this question about borrowed CDs that were never returned, and it inspired my question:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AqLfILqRwfBf4C30h_frVyTsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20071203151238AAhS63C&show=7#profile-info-31sPPNpTaa

Right before I moved to Cleveland briefly in the '90s I went down there to visit for the weekend, and while I was there my car was broken into. I'm not even going to get into the damage done to my brand new system, but while these punks were in there they stole 15-20 CDs of mine. There was a time when I could rattle off every one that was taken, but I can't do it so easily now. I can tell you this, though...some of those CDs have never been replaced.

It doesn't necessarily have to be from theft (maybe you keep all of your music in MP3 format and something happened to your hard drive, etc.), but has anything like this happened to you? Have you ever lost a considerable amount of music at one time? Have you replaced any of what is missing?

*carlito* - can I get you some coffee or something?

Thanks, Rckets. :)

Mike, Mike, Mike...

80'S MAN - the last year I spent in Ohio was a little south of Canton (also major farm country), so I remember it well and fondly. :)

*pours the dog another Jack, and a beer for herself*

Prof - good morning!

Morning, MachPen!

MachPen - are you serious?!? I'm dumbfounded by that!

Darth - I can't imagine what a house fire is like...I'm so sorry.

WOW...some very sad stories here...

Answer 1

edit: my edits aren't coming out, lol, Good Morning Sookie

Yes. I'll try to make this short. Now, I'm not sure if it was mostly stupidity on my part, but I lost three heavy CD cases (with ALL of my favorite CDs) on the flight from Frankfurt Germany when I was returning to the states to stay permanently. So, naturally, I was lugging around all of my life's possessions with me -- I'm talking the ones I didn't care to ship or toss in the baggage area I brought along with me as carryons. Bad idea. My ex had even insisted that I pack it in with the rest of my 'moving' stuff to have it shipped to the states, but I was like 'um, you're stupid...I gotta have my favorite tunes during this 12 hour flight... well, needless to say the flight was interrupted by bad weather, so it had to make a stop at the Baltimore airport where there was an 11-hour layover (11hours -ugh!!) We were scrambling to get all our stuff together for a connector flight. By the time we did, I'd realized that the only thing I wasn't carrying with me were my CD's they were gone :( *oh this is making my eyes water* LOL... it took a long time to replace all those CDs

edit: And that sucks about your car! I had a similar thing happen to me when I was in high school, and you want to know what they stole from me? My car club! How ironic is that!

Sookie, Rckets - Oh - I was stoicly dumbfounded. It was so traumatic. A CD collection I had taken years to build, a lot of bootleg imports in there, too. I had a blank stare of disbelief throughout the remainder of the flight home. Not to mention - it was a very silent flight home.

Answer 2

Not really. I don't lend CDs... ever... and I've been fortunate enough to never lose any large quantities of music. I did have a hard drive crash a few years ago, but I was able to recover everything there.

The closest I can get, and this is going to sound silly, was a failed attempt at recording a live concert off the radio. Z Rock, which was basically an 80s metal station out of Dallas (I think) was serving up a four concerts in a row over the air (the only one I recall was Badlands). Now, I could only pick this station up between the hours of 6pm and 11pm, and only on a crappy old boom box, but I got amazing reception and sound during that time period. Anyway, I invited a few friends over while the parents were out for the weekend and we proceeded to prepare for this massive concert event (which I was taping) while having some adult beverages and playing teenage reindeer games. As the first tape was coming to an end, and I was preparing to turn it over, I was distracted by a nice young lass from my Algebra class who decided to remove the majority of her clothing at that precise moment. Things progressed, and soon, a rather large pile of designer clothing was gathering in the middle of the living room. Excitement and shennanigans insued.




.... and I forgot to press the record button on the tape deck.







I'm still bummed about not getting that Badlands show.







NP: "Outlaw" - Dangerous Toys

***80s Man, I must admit that the evening went much better than anticipated.

*** What? What? What?

Answer 3

Aloha from Down Unda!
Yes! ~
1-1996 My favorite DJ [KPOI, 98 Rock], left Honolulu!
2- 2000 My 10" Open Reel Collection [from 1973-1999] including thousands of hours & miles & miles of professionally crafted audio library was rendered useless to me from 110 v/60 cycle USA electricals to 220v/50 cycle Australian current.
The shear weight of the collection & the machine made it cost prohibitive to ship to Australia but I COULD have had it 'converted'. Unfortunately, the entire system is somewhat of a dinasaur but the quality & # of the recordings was a tragic loss. On the fortunate side, the friend recieving my 'gift' reassured me that he'd just keep it for me til I get back...but I think it was his way of saying that 'threading' a 4 hour tape was 'too hard' compared to the convieniences of a 5 'disc' CD player! Oh well ~ The 3 large 3 ring binders of indexed music could be replaced with a Windows Media Player but it would surly need a few extra gigabytes of hard drive to store & another 20 years of 'collecting'. Where am I gonna git 3 Dog Nite, Mother's of Invention, Steely Dan & WolfmanJack? I don't think the Time/Life collection is as good as mine! Sure all the classics are easily replaced but the Beatles White Album, along with EVERYTHING they EVER did was on the reels just before ALL the ROLLING STONES. Am I STILL whinning? Hell yeah! Opps, sorry!

Answer 4

I’ve had numerous car stereos stolen from me through the years, which would have to count as a musical tragedy of sorts. There’s no worse circle of Hell to be in than having to drive as much as I do each day and not have a radio, even if it’s only for a couple days until I can get the next radio for the punks to heist. Fortunately, the thieves were very kind and always left my CDs behind. Perhaps the closest thing to a real tragedy was the one day I was playing around with iTunes on my PC at home. I was trying to transfer a music library from one computer to another. I forget the exact circumstances but it was something like a system recovery. Anyway, I thought I had backed up my music files properly when in fact I hadn’t. That ended up being hundreds of downloads down the toilet. The pain was immeasurable.

Oh, yeah, one more tragedy. I got kicked out of a Babes In Toyland concert because my date thought it would be a real great idea to bring in a controlled substance. That was 1995 and then they broke up. I'm still pissed off over that.

MachPen - Your story actually made my stomach hurt. That's very heartbreaking.

Answer 5

I bought a used 80G external HD for my Mac a few years ago. I ended up dumping all the mp3s I had collected over the past 9 years or so on it.. there were probably 8000 or so files, mostly rare and live stuff. One day I was working and the drive made this really awful ping noise and stopped letting me access it. It also had all the music files and samples that I use for my freelance work (I compose bits for commercials, marketing ect). And no, I had no good backups. I was able to replace maybe a quarter of the mp3s with stuff I had saved to CDR. Grrrrrrr...

Answer 6

I have yet to experience a personal music tragedy {except for the 1 CD a guy went of with}, but I am now having nightmares!

I really do dread what would happen to all my CDs ~ I think I need to get some of those big lockable metal cases that hold 80 each, just in case I need to get them out of the house in a hurry.

Years ago, my aunt had her house broken into twice {once at Easter, once near Christmas}, and had most of her CDs taken.

And someone I vaguely knew had all her Stevie Nicks CDs taken from her house ~ but it was literally just the discs. They left the jewel cases.

Answer 7

My house burned in 1996
My whole collection went up in smoke
I have spent a fortune on EBay replacing stuff over the last 11 Years
My original old Whitesnake Imports & Hawkwind vinyl collection..gone. All had to be replaced
I was more upset about My Hawkwind records than I was My Bonsai Trees

Answer 8

My worst musical tragedy occurred just in May. After my junior prom, I decided to go to my friend’s house for a party and well, we all should know what happens at high school parties. Let’s just say that someone decided it would be in my best interest to take pictures of everything and place them on a little social networking site called Facebook. I was pretty good about keeping everything under wraps from my parents till my brother found out about this little party and saw the pictures. He then decided to go tell my parents and show them the evidence… I didn’t know that they knew till I got home from school one day (a week later after the party) and went onto my laptop. My laptop had been wiped clean of everything I had- my music, photos and even school papers. I cried that whole night. I still don’t have even ¼ of my music collection back and I lost all my photo memories of shows that I’ve been too, and the pictures of myself with some of my favorite bands. I’m still depressed about it.

Answer 9

I've personally never had a huge tragedy with music, but this reminds me of something...
When I was younger I remember my mom's car getting broken into. They took every single tape she had (about 15 or so)... ranging from Cypress Hill to Blondie... but they left her Bee Gees tape.. hah. Her car being broken into was no laughing matter, but we thought that was hilarious, the fact that the Bee Gees suck so bad that he/she actually left the tape behind. They even took the MC Hammer tape!

I have had my Downward Spiral CD disappear from the house a few times. I don't know if the same person took or if it was just at the top of the "CDs to steal" list.
Oh, and iTunes crashes my computer constantly, so it takes me forever to update my iPod, that's on ongoing tragedy for me. heh

Answer 10

This is painful, *sigh*...

I once charmed someone into lending me his entire CD collection. (This is the only time I'm ever charming.) And there was some good stuff in there - like everything The Clash ever recorded, including live bootlegs. Plus some pretty rare world music, and I do mean rare. This guy had everything from Bedouin chants to Indonesian gamelan.

Rubbing my paws in glee, I lovingly ripped 'em all into mp3s over about two weeks, and burned them onto CD, leaving generous empty space for these precious recordings (I usually dice with death with the crappier stuff - if the capacity is 702 MB, I load 701.5 on that sucka. Well, not quite, but close.)

A couple of weeks later, I thought of listening to some of it on my iPod, so I popped a disc into my computer. It wouldn't read. Next one...wouldn't read. Next one...oh-oh. In fact, none of them would.

None of about 70 CDs, in fact.

The brand name of the blank CDs was Imation (the close resemblance to the word "Imitation" should have clued me in, but NOOOOOOOO), and a quick search on the net revealed that these were cheap Taiwanese-made CDs that were about as safe to use as condoms made in a factory manned entirely by porcupines.

And by now, the guy had left town, along with his entire CD collection.

I must've lost about 7,000 mp3s.

Gone.

Gone forever.

Gone for ever and ever and ever.

And ever.

Just...

...gone.


*dog stares moodily into distance, drains his Jack Daniels in a single gulp, slams empty glass onto counter top, then glares at the bartender for no real reason*