Max 5, AES and upward.

I'm going to the AES convention this year, under disguise of course. It's funny to go since I have in many ways stopped being on the same page as most manufacturers and it's been a headache since the late 90's to see what kind of crap the big boys roll out.

Don't get me wrong. I love to get schwag and talk gibberish to my fellow audio people but fuck if shit hasn't gone in the wrong direction for quite a while.

For what it's worth I couldn't have picked a better year to take a fist full of Advil and go. My dear friend Alan is going to be at the Tascam booth showing off his Gigasampler chops and of David Zicarelli's has just announced Max 5 which is an important release for Cycling74 and Max/MSP users.

I remember talking to David on the eve of the MSP release and getting personal computer advice because this release was the reason that I moved from a 68 machine to a PPC Mac. I would have dragged that change out for God knows how long otherwise if it hadn't been for Max/MSP

I suspect the release of Max 5 will probably be the reason that I need to finally buy a new computer. Hell, I already have the wii controller ready to go.

Maybe AES will not suck so bad. Maybe it will convince me that I really need a Tenori On.

DVD Part 4 and counting

Today Alan convinced me that I had to face my fears and buy a spool of disk. I headed over the the local electronics discount place then the office supply place when the first had almost no selection.

From what I had read Sony disks were considered safe, good and generally available so I bought a 50 pack of their AccuCORE DVD-R's and headed to the testing ground.

I put together a folder that weighed in at 4.0 Gigs and dropped it in Toast. I choice burning speed as "best", began the process and waited. At the 1 second left mark, a write error appeared and Toast crashed.

Hmmm... Maybe it's something I did?

I restarted the computer and began the next burn, this time at "2x", I waited and watched and Guess what happened...

As pissed off as I was I figured the drive it's self was most likely fucked and I decided I should consider cutting my losses, pull the hard drive out and wack the fucking computer with my chain mace, which my wife apparently hid.

I networked the soon to be destroyed eMac with my Mirror Door and transferred the test folder.

Next I happily popped in a fresh disk and hit all systems are go. I leaned back in my chair and felt pretty satisfied. I imagined what I could do with the eMac's carcass to ensure it's total suffering. As the burn came to an end the same error notice appeared, crashed Toast and made me see blood red.

I now began to wonder whether these drives didn't like the dyes being used on the DVDs. I put in a CD-R and burned it on the eMac, I did another I verified that they matched the original files... 100% fine.

FUCK!!!!!

I'm now going to research compatibility issues with DVD-R brands while I debate buying another hard drive and returning this batch of disks.

DVD-R part 3: UPDATED

In my last post on this subject I had said that I had tried to contact the company that manufactured the disks. Since that time, I have not received a response. Here is my note to them:
_________________________________

I've been a TDK user my whole life. I have never experienced any issue with your cassettes, DAT, CD-Rs in many personal and professional applications.

A few months ago I bought one or two spindles of 1-16x 4.7GB disks.

Over a period of time I burned, verified and tested about about 150 disks of both data, audio and video successfully I placed them back on a spindle.

When I went to retrieve a disk I discovered it wouldn't read. I became concerned and started testing all the disks. about 100 or so disks were no longer readable. They were tested on 5 computers with different OS' and the video disks were tested on two DVD players.

I have researched this topic for two weeks now and have not found any information on disks being created, tested as working, stored and tested as not working within a three month period.

As a professional who has used optical media for some time, I am at a loss as to 1. what could have possibly happened 2. what to do to possibly retrieve the data.

I would greatly appreciate it if you could forward this around the company and see if you can help find a solution.

All disks were burned on two Macintosh's running up to date versions of Roxio Toast. The numbers on the disks read CMDR47G-CTMW01-104 3115

Thank you for your attention.
_________________________________

Alan suggested I post in the forums at doom9.net which I have done. Although I have not found a solution, I have at least read a fair amount of interesting information and the people on the forum have been supportive.

I found a Japanese application called DVD Media Inspector which allowed me to locate who actually manufactured the batch of disks. I was able to do decoding by comparing the data with information on this site.

Meanwhile the handful of disks that aren't totally dead are dying fast. They take minutes to read and many give errors if I try to copy them and I am still searching the house for all disk from that batch. I am at a standstill as to whether I will be able to trust DVD back up again.

Robot Love

Alan turned me on to this site. Check out the page with robots. I am so interested in living with robots and maybe starting a band with a bunch of them.