Your random annoyance of the day

The local newspaper hired a debt collector to get $20 out of me. I paid for a 3-month subscription in cash under the assumption (after being told by the salesman) that my service would stop unless I wanted to re-up, and they kept on delivering for an additional 4-5 months. Fuck those guys.

haha re-up ;)


Had some SICK guitar riff in my mind during class, now I forgot how it was. FUUU

I carry a small recorder in my pocket in case I get a cool idea for a melody. I get lots of bizarre looks walking around mouthing guitar riffs or humming into my hand.
 
I'm currently owed just over $2k, and not even by bands. By other engineers. One's under contract and the other hasn't received files yet so it's not like I'm totally screwed, but one project was from early October and one from mid-August. Some people in this industry really, really suck.
 
256GB SDD with W7 installed died on me while I was finally getting a troublesome song together. Got 14 months of use out of it.


Not sure if I'm even going to be bothered with getting another.. Back to regular SATA then :erk:
 
Not a SSD card, it's a solid-state hard drive ;)

Actually, after having battled with the thing for about 5 days, I found out the early batches of my particular drive had some weird factory bug; the drive would basically stop working after 5200 hours of use.. :guh:

http://en.kioskea.net/faq/29514-crucial-m4-how-to-remove-the-5200-hours-bug

Luckily, after an uneasy firmware update, the drive seems to be working fine again! :) so, I'm a happy camper.



One thing I think I was doing wrong was writing audio continuously on the SSD with the DAW. From now on, I'm going back to using one of the regular drives for that, to help prolonging the life of the drive; after all, audio recording itself does not appear to have any improvement when done over the SSD.

For me the biggest advantage of using a solid state is that the annoying latency for guitar sims (using a Fireface 800) especially for fast riffing is basically gone with the SSD, and W7 operations seem to run smoother.
But again, it does nothing to improve the capturing nor the quality of audio, as in that regard it behaves just like any other hard drive.
 
Ah, touché.
haha

Thanks! I'm still weary, but seems so far like the problem's solved. I was able to salvage all my recent stuff, so it's really only an inconvenience now.
 
Not a SSD card, it's a solid-state hard drive ;)

Actually, after having battled with the thing for about 5 days, I found out the early batches of my particular drive had some weird factory bug; the drive would basically stop working after 5200 hours of use.. :guh:

http://en.kioskea.net/faq/29514-crucial-m4-how-to-remove-the-5200-hours-bug

Luckily, after an uneasy firmware update, the drive seems to be working fine again! :) so, I'm a happy camper.



One thing I think I was doing wrong was writing audio continuously on the SSD with the DAW. From now on, I'm going back to using one of the regular drives for that, to help prolonging the life of the drive; after all, audio recording itself does not appear to have any improvement when done over the SSD.

For me the biggest advantage of using a solid state is that the annoying latency for guitar sims (using a Fireface 800) especially for fast riffing is basically gone with the SSD, and W7 operations seem to run smoother.
But again, it does nothing to improve the capturing nor the quality of audio, as in that regard it behaves just like any other hard drive.

I have a 120GB SSD in my machine right now. I am definitely glad I went this route, yet it sort of makes me nervous. I have Win 7, Reaper, antivirus, and a few other things installed on the SSD. All recorded audio goes to HDD as well as any other saved data.

I seem to have an issue though. With amp sims, I like to use 1 instance/chain on each guitar track. So say 4 chains, and that's it.....lowest buffer setting on my Profire 2626 is 64 samples. At that setting, I get pops/crackles if I have 2 guitar chains running at once. I posted in another thread about this a while back and never solved the problem. It was getting really annoying having to enable/disable the chains back and forth during tracking. Someone here said that, with my specs, I shouldn't have these issues at these settings.
 
My studio HVAC broke today, I had to work with a band to program some drums.
I deleted some midi info and Cubase autosaved the section then crashed. I couldnt ctrl+Z.
The guy went home to get the midi again.
Then I figured that all of the tracks I recorded on sunday clipped, even if they were peaking arround -6db. Weird. Zooming in, it wasnt clipped. Soundwise = poop.
At the end of the day 3 cockroaches entred my studio (some assholes were eating yesterday near the door).
Crap.
 
My client heated up food that smelled like hot garbage from a fish market dumpster and sat next to me and ate it while I edited. I literally almost threw up it smelled so bad.
 
So I am working from home, it works really well for me as a freelancer, but there are bad things about it, too.

One of our neighbors moved out after 20 years, our landlord is renovating the flat and the guys there are working
with jackhammers, sledgehammers and percussion drills 10 hours per day during my working hours - it sucks sooo
hard.
Isolating headphones with loud music doesn't help alot because you can even feel the vibration.

Working from a cafe or something like that isn't a real option, so I am giving my best at ignoring it, but it's pretty
hard.
 
lowest buffer setting on my Profire 2626 is 64 samples.

64 samples as buffer size sounds way too small (fast, but unsafe), for amp sims at least. I'm just re-installing stuff right now, but the lowest possible setting Sonar even offers me is 5.8 msec/256 samples.

From Sonar's manual:
lowering the amount of samples improves audio Latency, though making it too low makes the system more susceptible to stuttering or dropouts.

IIRC I even end up doubling it to 512 samples (*even though the Fireface offers as little as 48 samples).


Like I said I'm still reinstalling my system, but if memory serves, that's the setting that works best for me.
 
64 samples as buffer size sounds way too small (fast, but unsafe), for amp sims at least. I'm just re-installing stuff right now, but the lowest possible setting Sonar even offers me is 5.8 msec/256 samples.

Should be no problem running a few amp sims at 64 samples. 3ms i/o latency.

You can always freeze tracks after tracking each layer if you need more power.
 
Lurking around in the crawl space of my new place, I discovered some pretty serious problems.

We have a shower/jaccuzzi and the "backplate" of the faucet wasn't caulked or sealed. Water was leaking from the shower head and entering the wall through the "backplate" (not exactly sure the term for this)......

Water leaks under the tile, as well as down the pipe and is dripping onto a JB and a wire that has been electrical taped. The water damage to the plywood spans maybe 8 feet on the underside of the bathroom, as I can see the plywood has water damage as well as about a 3 foot diameter on the wood that was laid down on the floor of the crawl space.

Needless to say, this does not make me a happy camper. But alas - we are renting, so it's not up to us to fix this. But if it does get fixed properly, it's going to be a bit of a clusterfuck in this place. How do remove jaccuzzi without removing wall?!?!