Hippo, birdies, two ewes...

... to trogula!! -- Have a good one!

Tracks and hacks

Worked on "Daddy's World", "Demon Lover", and "World Inside the Crystal" last night. "Daddy's World" might want some choruses from Emmy; I'm going to try that as soon as I can put together a recording machine that actually works.

Ever since the hard drive on Harmony failed on Tuesday, I've had problems with both of my pro-quality audio interfaces, leaving me with the UA-25 on the Mac laptop as the only useable solution. Not good. I'm going to try a reinstall on Harmony, which is temporarily patched up with its old (40 GB) drive in a somewhat unknown state. (Translation: I thought it was working, but it's been behaving weirdly.)

A string of annoyances

A major string of annoyances in the recording/editing workflow:

1. The hard drive in my recording machine (harmony) died.
2. I've had the devil's own time getting it up and running with the old 40GB drive it used to have, in part because I stupidly tried to add a third memory stick to it. Turns out it can only handle two of whatever I already had in it.
3. The soundcard in my main workstation (trantor) doesn't have the bass response I need to detect excessive booming in my guitar.
4. The Linux sound system (ALSA) appears to get massively confused when I try to log in simultaneously on two different machines with different sound configurations. Which means I can't easily use harmony for editing the way I was a few weeks ago when it still had its old disk.
5. Harmony doesn't have enough compute power and RAM anyway, and it's a little too noisy to keep in the studio bedroom in any case.
6. Although I could swear that I had my USB audio interface (an Edirol UA-25) working on Linux at one point, it doesn't seem to be working now. So I can't use it on the workstation. (It's possible that I could use it if I could figure out the right magic config stuff to use with ALSA.)
7. I've wasted much of yesterday evening and all of this morning finding all this out.

For now I'll record on harmony, edit on trantor and use dead reckoning on the EQ, but it will probably be worth my while to either move the good sound card to trantor, or get another like it. And right now the office is almost quiet enough to record in, so that may actually work.

OK, so I'm still an idiot

The main problem I spent all morning chasing, lack of audio on the newly-refurbished recording machine Harmony, turned out to be not having my userID in the appropriate groups for using audio devices.

Head, meet desk.

I did, however, acquire what I hope will be a quiet CPU fan for it, and in either case I may very well end up moving the Delta 66 soundcard into the office to trantor. Especially after I get the last of the tracks I need recorded, which hopefully will be sometime this week.

Fascinating

Thanks to this post by meglimir we get this fascinating tidbit:

If you try to send the string "d p n i" (with the spaces removed) to LJ either in a post, a comment, or a search, the server will not respond. It just sits there spinning its wheels.

I'm assuming the magic string is a component of some DDOS attack or something, but it's weird. Google takes it with no problem, and even turns up an LJ community. Which of course does not respond when you click the link.

Tracks

Worked after dinner (Mexican) on "Guilty Pleasures". The whistle really works. Revised my bass cut filter a little to get more of the boomy bottom string, and remixed to put my vocals in the center now that I have the whistle to balance the guitar. Still need to punch in one chunk from an earlier take (the break after the first verse), and get Jordan to do a real drum track. Other than that it's pretty good. Results so far: [ogg] [mp3]. Comments?

I can definitely hear further into the low end, even with my ancient ears, using the good soundcard. I'd probably hear it even better if I were in the same room rather than at the wrong end of two isolation transformers and 80' of cat5. Fortunately, now that I have the guitar EQ down pretty well I can get by on dead reckoning and eyeballs; I'll leave it in the bedroom studio until I'm done recording. Probably ought to take a day off for that. The new fan in Harmony is quieter, but higher in pitch. We'll see. Might have to replace the whole cooler, which would be annoying.

Progress is disappointingly slow, but it's happening. If I can actually sustain an average of two tracks/day I'll be done recording and mixing by this time next week.