Monthly Archive for April, 2007

Deadline

My father helped me to pick up our new washing machine yesterday (rock and roll!), and we visited a friend of his on the way home. This friend had recently had his lovingly restored Mercedes Fintail ploughed into by an over-zealous Ford Escort, completely writing it off. Worse, they were both competing in a competitive motorsport event at the time, so it’s very much an “at your own risk” venture. No insurance. It puts my phone into perspective somewhat!

I really admired his “get back on the horse” mentality. Only a week after the event, he’s already entered his Riley into next year’s competition, despite the fact that it’s little more than a chassis at present. However there’s nothing like a deadline to motivate you to finish something – and I suspect he will.

So I’ve been toying with the idea of setting myself a deadline for finishing this long-considered solo project. I’ve been writing and recording little bits and pieces for years now – well before the advent of The Third Ending – but without a focal point, it’s all too easy to put things off until “a better time”. Sometimes that actually does lead to a better result, but more often than not it just means nothing gets achieved (except maybe another hour of television might get watched). T3E progress was slooooooooooooow, but we did eventually get there. Without some sort of external impetus, I fear my own venture may stall at the gate.

So I’ll get around to doing something about that… sometime.

In-sewer-ants

And now the insurance claim on the Nokia has been declined.

Apparently the mere four doors the thief had to walk through to get to my private office means that it constitutes a public area.

Let’s hear 3 big cheers for ACE Insurance!

To PT or not to PT

After a few increasingly terse emails with the (interstate) retailer, it’s beginning to look more and more like I’m stuck with my pretty blue and silver paperweight. I could probably kick it along to small claims court, but to be honest, I’m running out of motivational steam. The time & effort it would take to argue is beginning to exceed the AU$470 purchase price. Chalk this one up to experience.

On the plus side, if I ever want to make a dramatic film-clip, I can bring my Mbox and laptop in lieu of a wind machine, so there’s some money saved perhaps. Plus if it’s a night-shoot, the crew can huddle around the laptop to keep warm.

So I’m left with a conundrum… I have all this gee-whiz-bang-industry-standard-dontcha-know Pro Tools software, and while I’m completely enamoured with REAPER, there’s still a stubborn streak in me that says “You’ve paid for Pro Tools now. You should use it”. Not on the laptop obviously (I don’t particularly fancy having to prise a heap of smouldering melted plastic off my studio table after each session) but perhaps on my old faithful studio machine.

It’s a stupid compulsion really. The software itself is clunky and bloaty – I needed to upgrade the RAM on the machine just to get it running somewhere near smoothly, and even then it didn’t match the performance of my previous software before the upgrade. Plus it neatly sucks you in to this cumulative payment system whereby you have to cough up extra dollars to unlock Digidesign’s arbitrary restrictions. I understand the need to segment the product range and retain a market for the high-end stuff, that’s just good business sense. Hell, I cut my teeth on 8-track tape, so a 32 audio track count limitation I can live with (or work around). But MP3 export, non-realtime bounce… these are universal and rudimetary features. I’d happily trade all of the “looks just like a photo of an 1176, sounds like a photocopy of a digital ass” plugins for a solid set of useful features that don’t damage my machine.

Is there a “laptop non-combustion module” upgrade available by any chance?

Anyway, I’ve been compiling a pros and cons list for persevering with Pro Tools.

PROS

  • It’s the “industry standard”, and therefore worth learning
  • It came with a lot of useful bundled software and plugins
  • I paid for it, and dammit, I’m getting my money’s worth

CONS

  • It’s the industry standard, but probably shouldn’t be, and deserves knocking off its perch
  • The bundled software and plugins are absurdly limited in their functionality, and in most cases are easily surpassed by freeware and open source alternatives
  • I already wasted my money – no sense also wasting my time
  • I am neither insane, nor a masochist

So I’m afraid the cons have it. Pro Tools for the round-file. Thank God for that. May it never blight my door again.

Fare thee well phone…

Some twerpy little maladjust actually came into my office yesterday and took my brand new Nokia 6288 off my desk. I turned the place upside-down all afternoon thinking I’d just misplaced it, but when I checked my un-billed calls online this morning, it seemed someone had been busy dialing “19xx” numbers and downloading songs. Luckily I had the SIM blocked fairly quickly just incase, and the handset itself is insured (provided they approve the claim), but I’m still going to be out $125 excess. They’ve dialed a few regular numbers as well, and I’ve half a mind to call them just to say “your friend is a dickhead”, but that’s not really likely to get my phone back, and if we’re being pragmatic about it, that friend does know where I work now.
On the bright side, they used my account to download a few songs, which they might otherwise have picked up from BitTorrent. So in my own way, I’m helping to fight piracy.
God I hate bogans.

Consumer Alert

If you have a laptop, think very carefully before you buy anything with “Digidesign” written on it.

I picked up an Mbox 2 Mini in late January. “Marvellous”, thought me. “I can dip my toes into the wonderful world of Pro Tools, and have a portable USB interface to use with the laptop”. It was quite expensive compared to the non Digi hardware, but that’s the price you pay for quality… err, right?

Pshaw.

I had some audio work to do this weekend just gone, and I was away from home. The perfect opportunity to use my nifty little USB doohickey. Loaded in the ASIO/WDM drivers, and the strangest thing happened – the CPU meter pegged up to 100% and stayed there until I shut down the audio application. “That is rather odd”, thought I. After quite a bit of hunting around, I came across a rather enlightening discussion on Digidesign’s support forum.

After acknowledging the problem, a Digidesign representative promises to investigate, and later informs people that they are working on a fix. Then they return (after a lengthy delay), not with a solution, but rather to inform the large number of unhappy customers that this is infact a feature, not a bug. Apparently the variable CPU speeds of some mobile chipsets offends the delicate sensibilities of the sensitive new age Digi drivers, so they just bung a 100% load on the CPU all the time so it doesn’t get a chance to slow down.

What it does do is heat up. Quickly. Then of course the fan kicks in – so you end up trying to record audio on a machine that’s uncomfortably hot to touch, and sounds like a Boeing taxiing for take-off. The fan I could live with (although it’s rather frustrating), but the heat is un-tenable. It will shorten the life of the hardware, and as far as I’m concerned that is beyond the point where it’s acceptable.

The funny thing is, I then installed the tiny, free Asio4all driver, and everything ran absolutely bulletproof using the laptop’s built in sound chip. The altruistic spare-time coder trumps the monolithic industry standard.

Again.

Suite Sweet Suite

There is something soothing about coming back to my own little audio-suite space on a Monday morning. I had a good weekend, and was sad to bid Sunday farewell, but being able to come in, switch on the kettle & the genelecs (and increasingly often, the heater), and sit down with a coffee while I mentally gear up for the day is quite pleasant.

I spent a goodly portion of the weekend converting Clare’s old laptop into a music production workhorse. She recently bought a shiny new silver Core Duo thingy, which means her perfectly serviceable Pentium M 1.8Ghz goes to me (for a modest fee of course). I loaded Reaper and a bunch of my favourite low CPU VST instruments & effects, and I’m all set for portable demo recording goodness. I was going to hook up my Mbox 2 Mini with the ASIO drivers (Slow-Tools would bog that machine down to a mollasses-like-crawl) but I’m actually finding the Asio4All driver is doing the job perfectly well for the intended purpose. Admittedly I won’t be tracking any hit songs with the on board sound hardware, but for donning the headphones and jotting down a quick idea, it’s perfect. Like a glorified 4-track, pretty much. Now I’m looking for a solution to use some VSTs in rehearsals/live. I was messing around with the demo for Brainspawn’s Forte software, but it seems to have much higher perceived latency than REAPER does under the same buffer settings. Still playable, but a bit laggy feeling. Oddness…

We’ve done a couple of interviews for the T3E album this past week or so, plus the reviews are starting to trickle in, and they’ve been very positive for the most part – very exciting. It’s nice to feel the promotional juggernaut swing into action, with the ensuing promise of perhaps DOZENS of extra sales. Marvellous. Album #2 is shaping up nicely as well. Of course now that’s underway, all the ideas I’m coming up with are completely unsuitable for a nouveau-prog outfit such as ourselves. I’m sure I’ll come up with a use for them somewhere.