So, then what? $500 drive recovery? Piece the collection back together with old, incomplete backups and re-ripping CDs I could find?  That would only get me half-way there for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I often buy from iTunes. There’s no replacing lost iTunes purchases. Secondly, though eMusic, my second–and previously favorite– source of music once did allow re-downloading purchased content, their new policy (with accompanying downgrade in buying power per subscription tier) disallows pulling another copy of your purchases.

Let me preface my introduction with the statement that I am, in general, opposed to the idea that everyone in the world should be forced to maintain a music collection. Now that I no longer purchase a physical copy of an album why am I maintaining a pseudo-physical version of it. Why can’t I buy permanent access to a digital version sourced in the ether? Is there a need for 16 million digital copies of ____insert album here_____?

Enter Rdio. ( Try it free for 30 Days )

Rdio has completely changed the way I ‘manage’ my music collection. In a way I don’t manage it anymore. Think of it as Last.FM , Pandora or Rhapsody on crack. That works on Mac and Linux. With program and interface design that doesn’t suck. For $5/month.

Rdio allows me to pay a minimal monthly subscription, $5, for access to their varied, current, deep collection. I matched my old iTunes library by uploading the xml library file from my old collection with the failed hard disk and Rdio found most of my music and added it to my Rdio collection. There are holes in their library; local music that has never made it into the world of online music sales will, in my case, have to be re-ripped and maintained on my personal machine. Just buying the hard disks to maintain a collection a fraction of the size of that available to me through Rdio would get me 2 or 3 years of Rdio.

For another $5/month I can use Rdio on my phone (available for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry). The phone implementation is impressive. In some odd way, I figure any service that bothers to build natively for Blackberry is probably worth their salt. That said, I’ve only used the iPhone app. I can manage my collection nearly as well as through the website with the mobile app. Of note, to shuffle or randomize your playlist you have to tap the album art while music is playing to drop a menu with the standard ‘shuffle icon’.  Took me a while to find that.

Most importantly, the mobile app allows you to ‘sync to mobile’ any song or album or playlist for off-network listening.