Further my explorations in finishing my audio rig, I’m getting close now. So very close.

I had ditched the Alesis i|o 26 a while ago due to its really poor drivers. This pretty much convinced me that I don’t like firewire audio interfaces. I don’t see the point really when you have a desktop computer and latency is important. In my experience, PCI drivers are more solid. Perhaps on a Mac this is different, but even the heralded RME drivers used way too much CPU when I pushed them at all.

For a while I reverted to my EZbus/Audiophile setup. M-Audio may make absolute crap but they know how to write a driver, or at least a solid PCI card driver. And I didn’t have to worry about the quality of the card’s converters or clock since it was handing those duties off to the EZbus Mixer. But I quickly remembered why I ditched this setup in the first place. Sure, the output amplifiers on the EZbus are really nice, but the pre-amps have little-to-no headroom which makes them pretty useless for any sort of line-in. I’m guessing that the converters and clock are above average at best. And the loop-back latency is huge. Plus there are a few other limitations that I won’t bother to enumerate but make it a less than ideal recording rig, digital lofi or no.

So, after another round of reading specs and gearslutz.com threads, I bought a Lynx L22 card. I contacted the guys at Mercenary Audio, who are fortunately just up I95 about 20 minutes, and they had one in stock.

Let me take a minute to say a few kind words about Mercenary. Obviously, I’m lofi. And kind of thick. On top of which, I don’t have a lot of money to throw around. I’m not entirely their target customer. But they treated me with complete respect, answered all my stupid questions, and helped me understand my purchase. They also showed me around their studio and workshops, which was very inspiring. I can’t recommend them enough. I really look forward to being able to business with them again.

The Lynx was a painless install. More importantly, the difference in the sound was stunning. The same night that I installed it, the friend that I record with came over. I didn’t tell him about the upgrade and just pulled up a song we had been working on. “The bass sounds great,” he said a few bars in. “What did you do to it?”

Seriously, insert your favorite audio snob cliché: “Blanket lifted off the mix…” “…punchy…” “tight bottom end…” et cetera. I just know that a lot of the muddiness that I/we had been struggling with was either cleared up or much easier to sort out. Even running into the EZbus (via SPDIF, so clocked and covereted by the L22) the improvement was stunning.

But the problem was basically, what to use as an interface. The EZbus wasn’t going to cut for the aforementioned reasons, and I don’t have the dosh to splash out on a summing box, outboard converters or an AES mixer. Nothing was really worth my trouble in my price-range after blowing my load on the card itself. Then it occurred to me: just use the Alesis as an small mixer, and save myself a lot of expense and hassle.

So I get all the advantages of the Alesis (multiple in and outs, SPDIF, optical, phono) but I don’t have to worry about its shortcomings. It’s converters, as near as I can tell, aren’t all that bad, but since I’m summing to the Lynx, as well as sending my analog signal to the L22, it is basically souped up patch-bay. And for that it works pretty well.

All I need now is a decent pre-amp.

So my advice to you bedroom producers and project studio jockeys: scrimp and save and get yourself a decent soundcard. It’s worth it.

Surprising absolutely no one, but pleasing nonetheless, Cakewalk have polished their shoes for NAMM and released a new patch for Sonar. A great set of fixes and some nice additions to the step-sequencer.

What’s especially interesting is you may probably will be able to use one of these.

You know, provided Euphonix write some solid Windows drivers and keep up with production. But it does seem poised to make Mackie Control users feel very inadequate.

Yanks. Always with the hyperbole.

But now that the feasts are winding down, denizens of the U.S. now prepare for their second helping of crass gluttony: discount shopping.

I won’t go into how distasteful I find the whole thing, but suffice to say this year I’m half expecting riots.

Nevertheless, chances are if you’re near a metropolitan area you could brave the evacuation-level traffic to get something like %20 off some already marked-down crap at your local Guitar Center.

Ah Guitar Center. On the off chance you don’t have any first-hand experience with a Guitar Center Superstore, well, picture MusiciansFriend.com and MySpace, but, you know, as a store. Or more specifically, as a supermarket.

Yet, for all it’s petty crimes - bad to laughable advice from staff, devaluing of musical instruments¹, the impact on smaller boutique shops^{see 1} - I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think they get a bad rap.
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I’m more or less back to square one. Or, rather, 1.5.

I’ll tell you, I was a lot more sternly judicious in what I installed this time. Because my sample storage was intact, I was able to save myself a lot of time re-installing libraries like BFD and SampleTank. Even still, it was fuckin’ tedious. And there were a lot of recent updates that I didn’t have burned to backup so tracking/downloading files and registrations, logging on the various websites, only adds to the chore.

Here are some thoughts/observations on DAW-oriented pre-crash recovery. This is may be real 101 stuff but they’re lessons I’ve learned.

• Know you’re sequencers’ default audio storage location. Even if you immediately change it, or have been working from the same per project directory structure for years, make sure you check it during backups periodically. I know that mine had accumulated a fair degree of crap over the years for various reasons. I corrected it when I came across it but never really addressed the WCS. So I’m not sure how deep the damage, and hopefully it will be mostly on projects long ago abandoned, but nevertheless…
• Futher this: When working with plugins, particularly softsynths, and you’re shutting a project down for the night, it’s a good idea freeze/render/bounce/whatever before closing out. If it’s a complex multi-out instrument you could just bounce to a temp track, just so you have guide. I’ve had this nip at me occasionally just as it is, you load up some synths and it has suddenly detuned itself or reset all its parameters. But when you start changing plugin addresses it’s a really recipe for things breaking.
• Maintaining a simple text file of all your registrations and address information will only get you so if you’re audio rig isn’t connected to the internet. A thumb drive is essential. Nevertheless it’s still cumbersome.
• Some companies need to take a good look at their web-based registration strategies¹. And thank you to those companies who make it easy.²
• Keep your drive image software up to date. Otherwise it’s just useless.
• Do not attempt to “slipstream” your install unless you really know what you’re doing.
• Simplifying is not over-rated.

I also misplaced my Sonar 2 CD case serial number (perhaps temporarily; I might be able to dig it out yet, there’s some boxes in the closet…). So I don’t have the Timeworks EQ and Compressor at the moment. While I certainly have a lot of things that can replace ‘em ably, I used them a lot for many of years.

So, yeah, a lot of this is due to my glacial working pace. And my stubborn refusal to hook my audio computer up to the internet teat.

So, I’m looking at my hard drive crash as my computers way of telling me it was not happy, and I needed to streamline my process. I plan to get a good disc imaging program and make a good clean go of it.

^{1Spectronics comes quickly to mind while I wait to hear back from support on just how to re-authorize StylusRMX. But there a couple others whom I won’t slag off here.}

^{2Anybody who generates their serial number from a unique user name or user account - Melodyne (particularly sophisticated), SonicCharge, AudioDamage - and while NI I believe is machine based they’ve pretty much nailed the engineering of the activation control (YMMV).}

^{Photo courtesy of Jim Hankey. (See comments.)}

Well…

A new hard drive and a copy of MS WindowsXP Professional later, the computer is back up. And it seems my SATA samples & audio drives are intact. XP Pro recognized them with out the brief struggle I went through on my old polluted XP Home installation. So good news.

But getting here was not easy. My legally obtained copy of XP Home Upgrade was useless to me since I had somewhere along the line lost/discarded my WinME installation disc. (Don’t laugh. That OS worked way better for me than 98 ever did. Okay, laugh a little.) I had an old version of Ghost and a DVD image of a previous OS re-install - and I struggled for a day trying to make it work with floppy drives and boot-disks, half-remembered DOS commands and old 8-bit programs, the works, all bringing up memories of long past IT work. But nothing worked and I don’t have the time.

I thought briefly about Vista. But then I thought better. Really, I have nothing against Vista - it’s on the very laptop on which I’m typing. It’s a fine OS for internet and 2D graphics and web coding. But it wants to be connected to the internet and I’m just not prepared to go down that road with my music rig. I’m fine with never having to worry about network drivers and firewalls and such. Not connecting my DAW to the internet does bring up some interesting issues regarding the OS and driver updates however. (And I get to speak to someone on the Microsoft payroll when I activate it over the phone. Always less painful than I think it’s going to be.)

So I have to decide whether it’s worth it to install one of the gray-market post-SP2 update packagesor not. I mean, looking through this list there’s a lot of crap I could not care less about; and then there’s a few things like this: A non-paged pool memory leak occurs when you capture specific MIDI SYSEx messages in Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 Yikes.

So, while mucking about in the guts of my music computer, of course I got to thinking about just chucking my motherboard & CPU (ASUS & AMD 64 3200+ respectively) and just go dual processor already. I mean, I’m already having to rebuild my work environment from the ground up. And my motherboard is not communicating well with my processor fan so it won’t boot without telling me there’s a fan error or if I monitor the fan with some utility it reports the fan as turning on and off, which it clearly is not and the temp never goes above 46/47. (I’ve been ignoring it for the year or so that I’ve been running it.) So it’s kind of a crap motherboard. And I’m sure I would notice the speed and power.

So why not? Well, it would behoove me not to spend the money. I’d have to chuck in for some new RAM, probably go back down to 1gig for a while; it would probably all come to about $300 give or take $20. Moreover, I’ve been working fine for a couple of years with the same relative amount of power and getting along just fine. I’m really trying (I swear) to stick to “If I can’t afford it I don’t need, and even if I can I probably still don’t.” Why not hold out another year, or until something breaks, and get a real posh setup?

Anyway, let the driver & software installation begin.

^{The Gates cheesecake photo is via the Coding Horror blog and it’s a pretty interesting read. I recommend it.}

After six years, 2 different hardware configurations, and countless upgrades and installs, my primary hard drive seems to have shit the bed.

I guess the last-ditch software/plugin purge wasn’t enough to rescue a hard drive that is two years too slow for what I ask of it. I knew was going down eventually. Fortunately, I just went through an extensive backup. All my samples and projects each have their own dedicated drives and from the looks of things they’re intact. So unless things have gone far more wrong than I believe, I could just be a matter of reinstalling everything, which in some cases is huge pain in the ass.

So it could be worse. But I really wish I had the scratch to just buy a whole new system.

Here’s the deal. Wandered into a pawn shop - Ooo, look gear! - and stumbled upon a Korg Polysix. I would very much like to keep this instrument. I gave them $350 out the door, with 7 day full refund. And, sure enough, it’s afflicted by a well known defect with a battery leaking onto a circuit board. When it’s plugged in the lights go all wonky and it makes no sound. The analog lights seem to track okay, but anything with the digital memory is hosed.

I can try to fix myself using these very comprehensive directions:
Old Crow’s Synth Shop: Korg Polysix Upgrade/Repair Overview
(Note: this kind of site is why I love the web sometimes.)

Or I can try to find someone to fix it - I’m comfortable removing the board from the housing. And cleaning up the rest of the instrument.

I could probably find someone who would walk me through it if I had to.

But I need to figure out how much I’m willing to pay the pawn shop for a non-working Polysix.

Any thoughts on this?

Cheers for the help.

Note: Cribbed from a post I’m sure I’ll put on a few boards.

Further Note:
I knew about the battery thing before I bought it. I did leave the shop and read up on it. So I knew what I was getting into. But I figured with money back it was worth a gamble.

I’m think $50, maybe $100.

Cheers to synthmuseum.com for the advert.

All due respect to the designer for thinking outside the box. And I’d rather go to a party with one of these than Guitar Hero. But for $1300? Seems like it’s of limited appeal as a musical tool, at least in its current version. And it’s too expensive for the masses.

Perhaps by version 2, and it costs a couple hundred, it will be the thing to have. It will be interesting to see if it makes it that far.

Last Saturday I was out with my girlfriend enjoying a sunny early morning the way a lot of New Englanders do: hunting down yard sales. Mostly it’s a chance to get out of the house early and explore a little - we burn out on it pretty early, and we go get bagels at White Electric. I usually don’t have much hopes in finding some new toy, or weird piece of equipment that I might be able to use, and I certainly don’t have the killer instinct that some yard salers seem to possess.

But I actually found something on Saturday. At a neighborhood yard sale, amoung the usual bric and brack, old board games and terrible furniture: A Casio SK-1 with the original manual and a carrying case. Cool.
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Well, here it is.

As I stated earlier, I’m getting rid of my mighty fine RME Fireface 400, until such a time as my room, ears and level of professionalism can support/justify something of this alleged caliber.

But, hey, my ignorance is your gain.

Check out that 100% feedback rating, baby.