Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

I’m trying to resist the urge to go out and by another Jasper Fforde novel. I’ve recently finished the penultimate (so far) in the Thursday Next series, and I’d love to keep going, but I’m mindful of the fact that once I’m done with it, that’s the last of the series for a good while. And that’ll make me sad.

Plus I probably shouldn’t be dropping $22.95 on a book when I still owe Corny some dollars, and while we’re looking to buy a house.

Which reminds me – we’re looking to buy a house

Quite possibly the most stupid decision in the world given the current financial situation, but then again the other 50% of the analysts seem to think it’s a very good time to be buying. So what can you do? I figure jump on board and then see which way it takes you. Wisdom’s easy in hindsight, and all that.

I mean what’s the worst that could happen?

Why is it that Windows XP feels infinitely faster and more responsive on my Macbook than OSX Leopard does?

Don’t get me wrong – I love OSX, it’s shiny and friendly and ergonomic and all those good Apple-y things. But it’s also a little sluggish feeling. Windows is not so nice, but I always feel a little more productive when I’m in that environment. And for some reason my wireless, which might be generously described as “tentatively feasible” on the OSX side of things, suddenly becomes reliable and speedy in Windows. Perhaps it’s a driver issue, but you’d think that if there’s ONE thing Apple could get right running their own OS on their own hardware, it would be drivers.

Sigh.

I’m going to change the focus of this little regular verbal skittering. Out with the music-only slant for a start – there are many more strings to my bow, and it doesn’t really make much sense to arbitrarily limit myself to one of them. I think I had this notion that you can be taken more seriously in a field if you devote yourself to it (or at least give the appearance of devoting yourself to it) but after careful consideration, deliberation, and other words ending with “ation” I’ve reached the conclusion “bugger that”.

Which is why, you might have noticed, there is no musical news in this particular message. It’s not that there isn’t any to be reported – there is at least a little – but I sort of want to keep this “focus change” post a bit clearer. Well, apart from all this rubbish I’m going on about now.

Actually I can’t back that up. I’m being paid and everything. However I don’t really feel like being here. Didn’t sleep particularly well, feeling kind of of “meh”. I didn’t get my audio fandangling done last night, and I’m considering doing something a bit silly.

I’ve also hit upon the realisation that I’m dressed like a complete slob. I’ve got slightly too old jeans on, with holes in both knees. If I squint and hold my head at the correct angle I can just about convince myself that they’re “fashionably dishevelled”, but to the best of my knowledge the vast majority of the rest of the world are conspicuously not doing that (I saw a few people on the way in who were squinting, but it was sunny). The baseball “style” jumper that graces my upper half was never going to be a high-fashion item, and its current condition renders it even further down the ladder. It’s not torn or discoloured, but it’s really only loosely approximating the shape which its manufacturers intended. Things start ok around the neck, but as it extends down it sort of tapers out in a cone shape and billows around my waist like some sort of demented torso-kilt.

I think I’m going to clean out my cupboard soon.

It is very shiny.

The Macbook arrived at work today, and it’s quite the piece of design I must admit.

There was a slight hitch on the “it just works” front when the isight camera failed to function, but a shut-down and restart fixed the problem. Shades of Windows there already!

I had been planning to pick up the Logic 8 Studio box, but I’ve decided to give my Pro Tools licence another bash for now. It does have a good reputation, and having paid the money back in January for the little blue hardware thingie and all the associated 1s and 0s, I’d feel it remiss of me not to try and actually use it a bit. After a skim through the 800+ page manual, it turns out it’s actually got a lot of features I didn’t even know about, so it could work out well.

Also, looks like I’ll be able to get Reaper to run using either fusion or crossover, which will give me access to my favourite bits of the PC audio world as well.

But all that is for the future. Thus far I’ve only had a poke around the various bits & pieces of OSX, and put some loops on the timeline in Garageband and pressed play. Strangely enough it sounded like every other garageband “composition” I’ve ever heard – 120BPM, 4/4 time, one chord. Get Timbaland on the phone!!!

Actually, he’d probably like it.

Then he’d steal it.

So on second thought, don’t.

Well…

I had a number of concerted attempts to work on some T3E material over the weekend. There are two great ideas of Curtis’s that I wanted to add some string parts to, and play with some melodic/lyrical ideas I’ve had swimming around my head.

A while back, I noticed an occasional weird freezing thing that my PC was doing in REAPER.

Well it’s doing that again. ALOT.

It seems to be some VSTis that trigger it more than others (SFZ was particularly problematic) but it’s still doing it occasionally regardless. If I switch over from the EMU to the Nvidia audio drivers on the motherboard it works again for a while, then freezes again.

It’s very weird… I press play (or record, or whatever) and the buttons on the transport “depress”, but nothing moves, plus it’s unresponsive to MIDI/audio input. The program itself hasn’tf rozen, I can still move around the interface, load, save, change prefs etc. But nothing other than a re-boot of the whole PC will get sound happening again, or the transport moving. Then after about 5 minutes of work, it happens all over.

It’s doing it with the Mbox too, so at least the EMU is ok… hrmm…

I tried rolling back to version 1.888 of REAPER (in case it was a funky Beta issue) and it still happens. I’m going to try a fresh install of the whole PC this week, and then if that runs, I’ll add VSTs one at a time and see if I can figure out what makes it fail.

I am THIS close to picking up a Macbook and a copy of Logic Studio on finance or Rental. I can’t really afford it, but it’s fully tax deductible, and at least I’ll be able to get some bloody work done.

Sigh…