I had a portable hard drive die in what I call “The Great Data Loss of 2004” and I basically lost every mp3 I ever had. I think it must have been about 40 gigs worth. Countless hours of downloading, ripping, encoding, and meticulously tagging audio files were thrown in the shitter all because I decided to buy what turned out to be IBM’s most failure-prone drive, the Deskstar 75GXP.

I’ve only recently started to put my life back together. I’ve been bringing stacks of old CDs into the office and ripping them as I work. It’s a slow process, but EAC combined with high-quality LAME encoding produces faultless mp3s that sound nearly as good as CDs to my ear. It just takes so frickin’ long.