one caveat

In my last post all smelled rosey and everyone was happy in the land of technology but I did forget the real test. Pro Tools.

Yes, I do most of my stuff in Pro Tools so it would be a good idea to test this plugin demo in there before I buy it. Before you remind me that I am kidding myself in believing that Digidesign's iron citadel was going to be a nice place to play, don't.

Rounds 1-5 consited of my trying to get Pro Tools to accept the fact that a demo of a five piece drum kit shouldn't overload the CPU in my Quad-Core T0wer. Needless to say FAIL.

Rounds 6-9 involved trying to figure out how to route through Sound Flower and out of the computer and back into the computer with a multitude of optical and other assorted orifices. The result, diddly squat.

So in this day and age where companies are benefiting from sharing information and supporting each other Digidesign still is holding on to the old way which not only sucked but if I recall the AVID video editing systems didn't fair well when they didn't want to allow developers to develop for the platform.

All this to say the growing pains of the tech world are still causing my head to hurt.

next please

After installing Pro Tools LE 8.O into my new Mac Pro I discovered that 2 Gigs of RAM was not enough to keep my mouse from spazzing out. The joy was only exacerbated by the lovely inspection of my new MBox2 Pro which feels like it was made by not just cheap but retarded Chinese slave labor.

I give up.

4 more gigs coming whenever the fuck the shipper decides to get around to it. Meanwhile I'll enjoy the speediness of the improved Ethernet speed and download some zombie porn.

it's not pro

1. If it's made entirely out of plastic
2. If it can't be serviced
3. If it's designed to take up very little space in your dorm room

This is is the first installment of what I imagine will be an ongoing bitch fest over turning a new computer into a usable recording device.

Enjoy my pain.

studios?

I will pretty much use any excuse to record with my band. Since we don't leave anywhere near each other it is only an occasion that can bring us together. My upcoming 40th birthday is just such a thing.

Once I got a sense that my somewhat unwilling comrades were willing to indulge my artistic fantasies once again, I began to look into studios.

With the proliferation of cheap studio gear filling people's homes and the real studios needing work I was pretty convinced the minimal requirements that I have to cut the basic tracks would be easy to meet and I would have a number of studios to choose from.
-Hell no!

Amazingly concepts like live drums, isolation and decent mixer are just old fashioned. I was picturing bringing in a portable set up, using their space, drums and montoring -nope.

O.K. Now bare with me for a moment.

All I want to do is record three people. One playing bass, one playing guitar, one playing drums (small kit -two mics). So if my math is correct that would be four tracks plus a fifth as a guide vocal.

I would like to record straight to PT (Mac) with a safety two track mix going to DAT or something and maybe have everything bussed to 8 Track half inch (as if that was even an option)

Somebody send me a sign.

The DVD-R vanishes

It's been a fairly long time since I started using digital media in my day to day life.
First DAT that ADAT then AIFF & SD II files on the Macintosh. Amazingly I had no problems with digital tape, few issues with audio files on the computer.

A few weeks ago while my wife was out of town I decided to toss in a DVD-R that I had recorded a concert on. I had left the last 100 or so burns on the spindle, which I knew was lazy and stupid, my lack of labeling was bad enough but this was a new low.

When I popped the disk in the computer spat it out. I tried again.. Spfitttttttt!! out it shot.
Shit!! No error message from the computer, no visible damage to the DVD-R. I was panicked. I started to go through every disk on that pile, all were bad.

After several hours of testing about 100 DVD-R disks on 4 computers running three OS' and two DVD player I realized something horrible had happened. But what was it? All good media, slow burns, verified and played back...

I have many disks here and the only ones that went bad were left on a spindle. I searched the Interwebs for clues but found no exact matches to my situation. I began calling experts and no one could come up with an explanation.

It then dawned on me... I have Pro Tools sessions and video work for myself and others backed up on DVD-R. I don't know where to begin.

This page talks about care for various optical media and is useful but does even hint at what I'm dealing with. I looked at various data recovery applications but didn't see one that looked good and was OS X. I don't know whether that speaks well or poorly for my chosen platform.

One thing I have seen over and over is that long term data storage should be done on hard drives, which leaves me to wonder what the fuck DVD-R's are for exactly. The other interesting thing is the CD-R is much more trust worthy and rugged, this is most likely because it's not trying to squeeze so much data onto such a small space.