I have (had) a relatively small collection of CDs, to be honest, I’m more likely to obtain copies of CDs from friends than I am to buy them. This is not because I’m a cheapskate or because I’m a pirate (mateys), it’s mostly because I don’t like most music enough to warrant buying it, but I like a lot of music enough to listen to it.

There are times (like when I get gift certificates) that I do purchase CDs though, and through these times, and just along the way, I’d collected about 30-40 CDs that I would call “worth listening to regularly” — so I did, in a CD stacker and a CD wallet which were in my car.

My car got broken into.

My CD stacker got stolen.

My CD wallet got stolen.

Therefore, all of my CDs got stolen in one foul swoop, and I was tuneless… without tunes. MP3s saved the day. Since I always left those CDs in my stacker and wallet in my car, I never got a chance to listen to them anywhere else. Since I almost exclusively listen to MP3s on my laptop and Nomad, somewhere along the line I had luckily gotten around to ripping most of those CDs to MP3 and saving them to my hard drive, which now lives in an external, portable USB drive enclosure. Thanks to the ability to back up my music to MP3, I now can retain copies (and even burn a new CD if I want) of the music that I legitimately purchased, where otherwise I’d have to go and buy it again (which would be difficult because some of the disks were quite obscure). Yey MP3s!