Weekendic Snafulations
Much of the weekend was spent in uphill battles.
Saturday:
I blew everyone off to try to do some audio work. I wanted to dub Lucas' concert onto the computer and get an idea of whether or not the songs would need alot of editing.
As it turns out, something in my recording process *is* inserting a few too many glitches lately. I'm pretty sure that it's either the MD player or my small MD recorder.
I'm not sure how to proceed on my budget to rectify this.
BUT... a few experiments have very conclusively shown me that the glitches are inserted *into* the recording, and not *ONTO* the recording. All of the recording data seems to be there, and if the glitches are carefully excised, the recording is what remains. This is an acceptable error. If there *must* be errors in a recording, this is the best kind.
And that's not to say this isn't a good recording. It IS.
Considering how modest a setup we used, it sounds REAL nice!
And again, I'm struck, just by listening this time, by just how DAMN GOOD this guy is.
So a completed version of the concert recording is going to involve a few more hours of work.
Sigh. As if I don't have enough of a backlog already.
OTOH, if I pretended to have a musical career and sat here waiting with *nothing* to do and nothing to show for it and nothing to work to make better or produce more, I'd be pretty pathetic. The trick lately is seems to be retrieving a little bit more of the reserves of patience that I've used before.
Part two was to try to make a little progress in ramping back up my next studio CD, that's been in the works now for (TOO MANY F******ING YEARS). When last I was at it, I had the vocals finished for most of it, and wanted to add a few more instruments on some of the tracks. But in the meantime, some of these songs, even unfinished, would be fine to mix down and use as demos. They're a little more familiar than most of the songs on Crazy Quilt #1, so, they might be a little more effective for scoring mundane musical work. Also, some of them ARE done!
So, now that I can record into the computer digitally, I was hoping to be able to skip a step in the process of uploading these tracks onto the computer for editing, processing, and mixing. That's what I *tried* to get started doing, anyway.
But I ran into a really *STOOPID* obstacle: some of these songs are true multitrack recordings, with several discreet things going on at once. The S/PDIF IO on the E-mu card can take in TWO tracks, and the Roland has S/PDIF out for TWO tracks, but what happens to the rest of them? Sure, I can dub them seperately, but get this: how do I then SYNCHRONISE these separate tracks, once dubbed, so that they're starting and stopping at the same places?
It's one thing to dub an entire work if all you have to do is press play and record on two devices. To make sure of no loss, you simply start the record deck 1st. But if you need synchronisation, you can't just do it that way. Human response (at least MY human response) has a lag time between my two hands even if I do my level best to do both things simultaneously. Show me someone who's NOT a martial arts master or professional drummer or something who can press play on one device while clicking a mouse on another, simultaneously, and have the lag time be closer than a few hundredths of a second.
There's an easy answer, of course, and lots of recording utilities have it, where they simply start the recording as soon as a noise comes in the input over a certain threshold.
And Audacity can do this.
But that function comes with the HYPER ANNOYING additional feature of SHUTTING OFF the recording as soon as the sound level goes back below that threshold. At it's most sensitive, it starts up on the ambient line noise from the input. At any other sensitivity, I'm stuck with any dramatic pause in the recording possibly triggering it, depending on how long it is.
I *tried* to tweak it.
In short, I can't get this to work. And additionally, YES, I *did* think of trying to change the threshold once the recording had started, and it won't let me do that.
I have SOME ideas for inserting things into the recordings on the Roland to use as a manual sync point: hand claps or maybe a tone of a certain duration stuck at the beginning or end of the song, and then used as a time cue to manually edit the parts into sync.
But it's irksome that this extraordinary bit of software that does almost EVERYTHING ELSE I NEED, has this one stoopid hard limit that it won't let me bypass.
I suppose an app could be written for Audacity that lets this happen the way I want. I don't know how to do it.
So, on Saturday, except for dubbing Lucas' concert, I made NO progress on the next Studio Album. Grrr.
Saturday night, however, was redeemed. Had I been making progress I would have stayed in. But I didn't want to fight with stuff anymore, so we went over to
werewulf's for her Julie Andrews mini film fest. Very nice. Alas and alack, tho, it was getting very late and we had to tear ourselves away with tears and regret about 10 minutes into Victor/Victoria.
Sunday.
Sunday morning I got a call from A, one of the Cambion ladies.
Her SO has passed away recently, a re-enactor of some note and MUCH stuff.
She inherited his house and the bulk of his estate, and is slowly sifting thru it, finding good homes, getting things to family members, and shuffling things down to combine their households so as to sell of the surplus dwelling. It's an ongoing process.
I'd offered to help on a mission thereto yesterday morning. It was to involve the moving of some "furniture items" and what was billed as "some other things". So, after being up late, I got a confirmation in the morning that the mission was on. So I threw on some clothes and tossed down some breakfast and headed over, where I was more fully briefed.
On the way over, I got a call from Mouse. I completely failed to see the foreshadowing in being informed that she and her party were lost despite having been sent written directions *and* using a GPS device.
As I said, I arrived ok tho.
But the mission was to be a smidge more complex than I had surmised. There were these TWO storage sheds. One had furniture and stuff. The other just had stuff. The Stuff from shed one needed to go to shed two. The FURNITURE needed to go back to the house. OK, this wouldn't be an easy one hour job, but seriously, How hard could that be?
Reinforcements arrived, in the form of S. and then Mouse with her two burly young men.
Ok, only one was burly, but the other was still another able body. We got the moving truck out of the driveway and to SHED 1, where, to my amazement, "some other stuff" turned out to be QUITE A BIT OF OTHER STUFF. The furniture was just a couple of items and not too big a deal. It was the other stuff that was the problem.
The plan was hatched, that the best way to proceed was to get everything out of Shed 1 and put it into the van, with the furniture being 1st/back/bottom layer so that the Stuff could be offloaded into Shed 2 more efficiently.
Five people didn't quite make short work of this task, but it got done with reasonable efficiency.
Then with me riding w/ A in the moving van, and S. riding with Mouse and her two young men, we set out for Shed 2.
Then it went from barely irksome to ugly.
On Rt29 Northbound, there is a place where the right pulloff lane narrows and vanishes briefly. About a 1/4 mile from this place, there was a sudden slowdown and backup of traffic. Why? Because RIGHT AT that point, where the pulloff lane vanishes, some jackass was pulled over, and had not thought to back up into the pulloff lane, but STAYED right there, flashers on, forcing traffic to have to slow down and creep around him(?), disrupting both moving lanes. The moving van, bless it's big fuzzy industrially strong hydraulic heart, managed to stop without flattening anybody.
Not so for poor Mouse, who did NOT have the advantage of height to see over the traffic and up the hill to anticipate that couple of extra seconds of time that she would have needed to stop in time.
The moving van sustained but a ding on it's American Steel bumper (that is built to withstand actually using it to find bollards and loading docks). Mouse's car OTOH was very mangled in the front, including radiator damage.
So now, we had a puzzle. The insurance things would sort themselves out just fine, but, the problem was that we now had but a moving van to get both people AND the stuff to Shed 2 and then back to A.'s house.
As luck would have it, Mouse's insurance directed her to a DAR CARS collision center that was just about a mile up the road from where we were, where, in that same industrial park, was ALSO Shed 2. So, about a mile with a busted radiator was deemed doable, since the car could move and steer ok. BUT, more snafulations ensued when A. misunderstood exactly where Mouse would be headed as there was a DAR CARS *dealership* right *next to* Shed 2.
So A. and I headed to Shed 2 thinking that Mouse & pty would walk over to Shed 2 from the DAR CARS *dealership*, seeing that it was right there. But Mouse & pty headed to the DAR CARS *collision* center which was a few blocks astray of there. We didn't know where they were headed, and a moving van is no pursuit vehicle in such traffic. The party got separated.
And then I realised that I'd left my cellphone in my van back at A.'s house.
And A. realised that she didn't have *Mouse's* cellphone number.
I want to say that hilarity ensued. What really happened is that it fell on me to unload the dang van and fit all that dang stuff in Shed 2. (It almost didn't).
By the time that process was finished, A. had *almost* managed to track down Mouse's cellphone thru other parties. Just to see if anything could be learned, we went to the DAR CARS dealership where a nice employee in the parking lot, forestalling a moving van wreaking havoc among their stock, informed us of where their Collision Center actually was.
We went there and found Mouse's car, but not Mouse &co. WTF?
As usual, I suspected zombies. Fortunately, I was wrong about that, but that didn't help us find them.
And We still had no way to reach them.
Hoping for the best, we headed to A.'s house where A. could possibly retrieve her other car and, hopefully where I could retrieve my cellphone and track them down.
Also, Time was running out for me as I had plans for later in the day.
Halfway back to A's house, we finally got a call from Mouse informing us that they had found a TGIFriday's near the collision center and walked over to it to grab a bite until they were found (somehow?). There still remained the problem of retrieving them. *THAT* turned out to also be snafulated as A's other car *was* in her driveway, but very blocked in by S's car.
My cellphone retrieved, we were finally able to coordinate, and when I left the scene, it turned out that I didn't need to go get them, as *someone else* was coming to affect that particular rescue. They would then all be brought to A's house to get the furniture out of the van.
I hated bailing on this, and for anything *less* important than a birthday dinner plan withsagesaria I would have stayed.
Just some furniture and some other stuff. How bad could it be?
Really, how bad could it be.....
So I raced home, and showered, and put on some *clean* clothes, and raced up to G'burg to retrievesagesaria. And wouldn't you know it, *more* snafulations ensued!
Aren't you shocked?
It wasn't so bad. I really should know better than to let my daughter navigate. Eventually maps were consulted, destinations determined, and routes *correctly* computed. Fortunately, these snafulations were more humourous than harm, and she got off of with only the mildest of mocking. And later my wife mocked *me* for not knowing the area better.
So we pigged out real good, and talked about her work in Tommy and for her birthday gift she got some flats suitable for her stagework, a poster, and a little bit of cash.
After the lack of sleep, the moving and hauling, the driving, the (finally) eating, the shopping, and then more driving, I finally made it home at about 9 where, not having much desire to sleep thru the Oscars, I crashed on the couch sleeping thru NASCAR.
Later, somehow,patches023 got me upstairs to bed.
Saturday:
I blew everyone off to try to do some audio work. I wanted to dub Lucas' concert onto the computer and get an idea of whether or not the songs would need alot of editing.
As it turns out, something in my recording process *is* inserting a few too many glitches lately. I'm pretty sure that it's either the MD player or my small MD recorder.
I'm not sure how to proceed on my budget to rectify this.
BUT... a few experiments have very conclusively shown me that the glitches are inserted *into* the recording, and not *ONTO* the recording. All of the recording data seems to be there, and if the glitches are carefully excised, the recording is what remains. This is an acceptable error. If there *must* be errors in a recording, this is the best kind.
And that's not to say this isn't a good recording. It IS.
Considering how modest a setup we used, it sounds REAL nice!
And again, I'm struck, just by listening this time, by just how DAMN GOOD this guy is.
So a completed version of the concert recording is going to involve a few more hours of work.
Sigh. As if I don't have enough of a backlog already.
OTOH, if I pretended to have a musical career and sat here waiting with *nothing* to do and nothing to show for it and nothing to work to make better or produce more, I'd be pretty pathetic. The trick lately is seems to be retrieving a little bit more of the reserves of patience that I've used before.
Part two was to try to make a little progress in ramping back up my next studio CD, that's been in the works now for (TOO MANY F******ING YEARS). When last I was at it, I had the vocals finished for most of it, and wanted to add a few more instruments on some of the tracks. But in the meantime, some of these songs, even unfinished, would be fine to mix down and use as demos. They're a little more familiar than most of the songs on Crazy Quilt #1, so, they might be a little more effective for scoring mundane musical work. Also, some of them ARE done!
So, now that I can record into the computer digitally, I was hoping to be able to skip a step in the process of uploading these tracks onto the computer for editing, processing, and mixing. That's what I *tried* to get started doing, anyway.
But I ran into a really *STOOPID* obstacle: some of these songs are true multitrack recordings, with several discreet things going on at once. The S/PDIF IO on the E-mu card can take in TWO tracks, and the Roland has S/PDIF out for TWO tracks, but what happens to the rest of them? Sure, I can dub them seperately, but get this: how do I then SYNCHRONISE these separate tracks, once dubbed, so that they're starting and stopping at the same places?
It's one thing to dub an entire work if all you have to do is press play and record on two devices. To make sure of no loss, you simply start the record deck 1st. But if you need synchronisation, you can't just do it that way. Human response (at least MY human response) has a lag time between my two hands even if I do my level best to do both things simultaneously. Show me someone who's NOT a martial arts master or professional drummer or something who can press play on one device while clicking a mouse on another, simultaneously, and have the lag time be closer than a few hundredths of a second.
There's an easy answer, of course, and lots of recording utilities have it, where they simply start the recording as soon as a noise comes in the input over a certain threshold.
And Audacity can do this.
But that function comes with the HYPER ANNOYING additional feature of SHUTTING OFF the recording as soon as the sound level goes back below that threshold. At it's most sensitive, it starts up on the ambient line noise from the input. At any other sensitivity, I'm stuck with any dramatic pause in the recording possibly triggering it, depending on how long it is.
I *tried* to tweak it.
In short, I can't get this to work. And additionally, YES, I *did* think of trying to change the threshold once the recording had started, and it won't let me do that.
I have SOME ideas for inserting things into the recordings on the Roland to use as a manual sync point: hand claps or maybe a tone of a certain duration stuck at the beginning or end of the song, and then used as a time cue to manually edit the parts into sync.
But it's irksome that this extraordinary bit of software that does almost EVERYTHING ELSE I NEED, has this one stoopid hard limit that it won't let me bypass.
I suppose an app could be written for Audacity that lets this happen the way I want. I don't know how to do it.
So, on Saturday, except for dubbing Lucas' concert, I made NO progress on the next Studio Album. Grrr.
Saturday night, however, was redeemed. Had I been making progress I would have stayed in. But I didn't want to fight with stuff anymore, so we went over to
werewulf's for her Julie Andrews mini film fest. Very nice. Alas and alack, tho, it was getting very late and we had to tear ourselves away with tears and regret about 10 minutes into Victor/Victoria.Sunday.
Sunday morning I got a call from A, one of the Cambion ladies.
Her SO has passed away recently, a re-enactor of some note and MUCH stuff.
She inherited his house and the bulk of his estate, and is slowly sifting thru it, finding good homes, getting things to family members, and shuffling things down to combine their households so as to sell of the surplus dwelling. It's an ongoing process.
I'd offered to help on a mission thereto yesterday morning. It was to involve the moving of some "furniture items" and what was billed as "some other things". So, after being up late, I got a confirmation in the morning that the mission was on. So I threw on some clothes and tossed down some breakfast and headed over, where I was more fully briefed.
On the way over, I got a call from Mouse. I completely failed to see the foreshadowing in being informed that she and her party were lost despite having been sent written directions *and* using a GPS device.
As I said, I arrived ok tho.
But the mission was to be a smidge more complex than I had surmised. There were these TWO storage sheds. One had furniture and stuff. The other just had stuff. The Stuff from shed one needed to go to shed two. The FURNITURE needed to go back to the house. OK, this wouldn't be an easy one hour job, but seriously, How hard could that be?
Reinforcements arrived, in the form of S. and then Mouse with her two burly young men.
Ok, only one was burly, but the other was still another able body. We got the moving truck out of the driveway and to SHED 1, where, to my amazement, "some other stuff" turned out to be QUITE A BIT OF OTHER STUFF. The furniture was just a couple of items and not too big a deal. It was the other stuff that was the problem.
The plan was hatched, that the best way to proceed was to get everything out of Shed 1 and put it into the van, with the furniture being 1st/back/bottom layer so that the Stuff could be offloaded into Shed 2 more efficiently.
Five people didn't quite make short work of this task, but it got done with reasonable efficiency.
Then with me riding w/ A in the moving van, and S. riding with Mouse and her two young men, we set out for Shed 2.
Then it went from barely irksome to ugly.
On Rt29 Northbound, there is a place where the right pulloff lane narrows and vanishes briefly. About a 1/4 mile from this place, there was a sudden slowdown and backup of traffic. Why? Because RIGHT AT that point, where the pulloff lane vanishes, some jackass was pulled over, and had not thought to back up into the pulloff lane, but STAYED right there, flashers on, forcing traffic to have to slow down and creep around him(?), disrupting both moving lanes. The moving van, bless it's big fuzzy industrially strong hydraulic heart, managed to stop without flattening anybody.
Not so for poor Mouse, who did NOT have the advantage of height to see over the traffic and up the hill to anticipate that couple of extra seconds of time that she would have needed to stop in time.
The moving van sustained but a ding on it's American Steel bumper (that is built to withstand actually using it to find bollards and loading docks). Mouse's car OTOH was very mangled in the front, including radiator damage.
So now, we had a puzzle. The insurance things would sort themselves out just fine, but, the problem was that we now had but a moving van to get both people AND the stuff to Shed 2 and then back to A.'s house.
As luck would have it, Mouse's insurance directed her to a DAR CARS collision center that was just about a mile up the road from where we were, where, in that same industrial park, was ALSO Shed 2. So, about a mile with a busted radiator was deemed doable, since the car could move and steer ok. BUT, more snafulations ensued when A. misunderstood exactly where Mouse would be headed as there was a DAR CARS *dealership* right *next to* Shed 2.
So A. and I headed to Shed 2 thinking that Mouse & pty would walk over to Shed 2 from the DAR CARS *dealership*, seeing that it was right there. But Mouse & pty headed to the DAR CARS *collision* center which was a few blocks astray of there. We didn't know where they were headed, and a moving van is no pursuit vehicle in such traffic. The party got separated.
And then I realised that I'd left my cellphone in my van back at A.'s house.
And A. realised that she didn't have *Mouse's* cellphone number.
I want to say that hilarity ensued. What really happened is that it fell on me to unload the dang van and fit all that dang stuff in Shed 2. (It almost didn't).
By the time that process was finished, A. had *almost* managed to track down Mouse's cellphone thru other parties. Just to see if anything could be learned, we went to the DAR CARS dealership where a nice employee in the parking lot, forestalling a moving van wreaking havoc among their stock, informed us of where their Collision Center actually was.
We went there and found Mouse's car, but not Mouse &co. WTF?
As usual, I suspected zombies. Fortunately, I was wrong about that, but that didn't help us find them.
And We still had no way to reach them.
Hoping for the best, we headed to A.'s house where A. could possibly retrieve her other car and, hopefully where I could retrieve my cellphone and track them down.
Also, Time was running out for me as I had plans for later in the day.
Halfway back to A's house, we finally got a call from Mouse informing us that they had found a TGIFriday's near the collision center and walked over to it to grab a bite until they were found (somehow?). There still remained the problem of retrieving them. *THAT* turned out to also be snafulated as A's other car *was* in her driveway, but very blocked in by S's car.
My cellphone retrieved, we were finally able to coordinate, and when I left the scene, it turned out that I didn't need to go get them, as *someone else* was coming to affect that particular rescue. They would then all be brought to A's house to get the furniture out of the van.
I hated bailing on this, and for anything *less* important than a birthday dinner plan with
sagesaria I would have stayed.Just some furniture and some other stuff. How bad could it be?
Really, how bad could it be.....
So I raced home, and showered, and put on some *clean* clothes, and raced up to G'burg to retrieve
sagesaria. And wouldn't you know it, *more* snafulations ensued!Aren't you shocked?
It wasn't so bad. I really should know better than to let my daughter navigate. Eventually maps were consulted, destinations determined, and routes *correctly* computed. Fortunately, these snafulations were more humourous than harm, and she got off of with only the mildest of mocking. And later my wife mocked *me* for not knowing the area better.
So we pigged out real good, and talked about her work in Tommy and for her birthday gift she got some flats suitable for her stagework, a poster, and a little bit of cash.
After the lack of sleep, the moving and hauling, the driving, the (finally) eating, the shopping, and then more driving, I finally made it home at about 9 where, not having much desire to sleep thru the Oscars, I crashed on the couch sleeping thru NASCAR.
Later, somehow,
patches023 got me upstairs to bed. 