Tracks and hacks, again

Spend an hour or so this morning working on "Vampire Megabyte". Still needs some sound effects, but it's getting there. A little more bass rolloff on the guitar, and some reverb on the sound of the stake being hammered in. It turned out that the various hammer-strikes, which all sounded pretty much the same dry, reacted very differently to reverb. I picked the best of them and duplicated it.

There was a power failure at work, about 15 minutes before our group's regularly-scheduled meeting. We all powered down our computers and went home to our live outlets and fast connections in hopes of getting some work done. Only thing left on my work agenda today is making reservations for OSCon, July 24-27. Unfortunately I have few friends left in Portland anymore.

The "hopefully quiet" CPU fan I acquired yesterday, a 60mm Thermaltake fan, turned out to be anything but. Loud, with a high-pitched whine that bored right through the noise-isolating case. I replaced it shortly after I got home with one of the 80mm CoolerMaster "neon" fans that worked so well on the Fry's computers. The results were astoundingly good. It's held onto the heatsink with gaffer's tape and a couple of business cards as spacers.

It's a good thing the fan worked out -- the alternative would have been deciding whether to spend $30 for a new fan and heatsink, or about three times that for a new CPU and motherboard. Which is a purchase I really don't need to be making right now. 8:10pm but I'll have to, because it turns out that gaffer's tape doesn't hold when it gets hot. Oops!

Hacking on tracks

Audacity rocks, is all I can say. Just added the spin-up and spin-down effects to "Vampire Megabyte". Cool.

( the audio-geeky details )

I'd still like some modem tones, somewhere around 300 baud. Which is something Audacity doesn't do, alas. May require advanced fakery. Or a real modem -- got one of those...

Oops!

Remember my clever hack with the fan and the gaffer's tape, a couple of posts downwhen from here? Just to refresh your memory, I'd written:

It's a good thing the fan worked out -- the alternative would have been deciding whether to spend $30 for a new fan and heatsink, or about three times that for a new CPU and motherboard. Which is a purchase I really don't need to be making right now.

As it turns out, gaffer's tape doesn't hold when it gets warm. There was a distinct smell of burnt plastic when I went to see why I couldn't ssh to the box...

It boots, with the old fan and a 20-minute or so cooldown. But still...

More tracks

Worked on "Bugs" a little: less reverb on me, less bass on the guitar (which allows me to bring it up about 3dB in the mix).

Oh, by the way: the drive that died in Harmony was one of my Maxtor 160's, not one of the older IBM 120's. The other 160 is my backup drive; this should probably tell me something. That and the fact that it's 85% full now. I should probably be looking for a 400. Next time Fry's has Seagate drives on sale...

Tracks

Finally, worked on "The Programmer's Alphabet" -- put in cflute's nice new chorus harmony, took capplor (Robin) out of the verses but left her in the choruses for balance, and re-adjusted the stereo map to put me and the guitar toward the center and the backup vocals on the outside. Stick a fork in that one, I think.

At this point I think I've done all but one of the tracks that don't need either some recording or some pitch correction. Both, in some cases. "Silk and Steel" is the only remaining easy one; I'll probably do that tomorrow.