"When I got that phone call, I said, 'No way,' " said Scalenghe, who even stopped going to the gym because she could not bear to exercise without her favorite tunes.
"I was so ecstatic," she said. "It was such a special thing to me. It was a jewel."
Police arrested a 43-year-old Northeast Washington man in the break-in, court records show.
Other victims also spoke of their digital music players as though they were as precious as jewelry. Sean Bennett, 34, a University of Colorado medical student, lost his device when a thief ransacked his car in January while it was parked in downtown Washington.
Touring several East Coast hospitals a few months ago, Bennett had packed his Nissan Pathfinder with clothes, a guitar, a few CDs and his new iPod, which contained several thousand songs. It had been given to him by his girlfriend and inscribed: "Sean Rocks! XOXO."
While his vehicle was parked on New York Avenue NW and he grabbed lunch nearby, someone smashed the Nissan's rear window and grabbed his guitar, a leather jacket and his engraved player. Bennett spent the next 10 days continuing his drive across the country but without the music he cherished.
Emily Carone, 20, said she, too, felt devastated when she returned to her dorm room at American University on April 4 and realized that her laptop and iPod had been stolen.
Carone had 3,000 songs stored on the player and laptop. Most had been laboriously "ripped" from her CD collection and from other albums borrowed from friends. She had purchased about 50 other songs from Apple's iTunes Web site for 99 cents each, she said.
Carone had plans to fill her iPod's memory capacity -- about 10,000 songs.
"I wasn't even halfway done," said Carone, a journalism student who also lost some interviews that she had recorded on the player.
A thief struck John Hoctor's Capitol Hill rowhouse March 14, stealing a digital camera, a laptop and an iPod that contained more than 2,000 songs.
Hoctor, 36, recalled how he had spent weeks huddled over the laptop, transferring his CD collection to his computer's hard drive. His collection of music is gone, and it feels as if he lost a friend.
"This relationship with my iPod was built on downloading all the music," he said. "The time and effort of developing a library, it makes you very connected with the library. It took the better part of two months. Now I have to start all over again."
Experts said they are not surprised that victims are reacting so strongly, because people often form special bonds with music.
"Everybody has a lot of memories they associate with music, and musical taste is usually very important to people," said Anita Boss, a forensic psychologist in Alexandria who has counseled crime victims. "You actually have a piece of identity theft here."
She added: "Anytime something is stolen that is so personal, victims are going to have a reaction like that. It's not the same as stealing a coat."
