Fare thee well, ye disk drive of Harmony

Last night cflute gave a good critical listen to CC&S in its present state. Main problem is boomy guitar, so lots of EQ is in order. More ears are good. We arranged for a last-minute recording session after I got off work today, and before her flight home.

A little before dinner, I went to update the audacity projects in Harmony (the recording box, of course)'s local track directory and got errors. Weird errors. Filesystem-corruption-type errors. Not good.

e2fsck'ed the drive. Twice. Attempted to reboot. It's fsck'ed but good. R.I.P. If I'm lucky I might be able to erase it. But by that time it didn't matter; I'd already given up on it for the night and copied the relevant track directories to the Mac laptop which, along with an Edirol UA25, constitutes my field recording rig. There was maybe half an hour of delay, but I got set up with a minimum of fuss.

Thank the Maker(s) for the fact that Audacity is cross-platform! Got good harmony chorus vocals on "Programmer's Alphabet", and a killer whistle part on "Guilty Pleasures". That one still needs some drum, but...

The drive in Harmony was one of the old IBM 120GB drives that were in the fileserver two upgrades ago (before the 200's and the current 400's). So it's not really surprising that it's finally bitten the big one. It could have picked a more convenient time, but at least it died before we recorded onto it, and before the corruption spread onto the fileserver. I hope -- there may indeed be some screwed-up tracks lurking in there. I have the weekly backups, but...

I'm an idiot

I'm especially idiotic when I'm seriously sleep-deprived. Or was that depraved. When attempting to synchronize my track directories before recording cflute this afternoon, I managed to copy the current track working directories from the fileserver into subdirectories of the corresponding directories on the Mac.

Fortunately, there's no real harm done: the tracks she recorded against were simply older versions of the most recent ones, so they're all synchronized against the same scratch tracks. (I can tell this because of the way I name my takes -- take-2e and take-2f are both recorded against the same original take-2.) So I should be able to snag the new parts, plop them into the really most recent version of the track, and have them work. Whew!

I think I should have gone to bed a little after lunchtime.