Several of Damocles' Swords taken down.

I had plans for Friday. Nice plans. Sweet plans involving someone who has been trying for years to get me to come to her annual party- making sure I was invited, knew, and asked me repeatedly if I was coming. I was all set to go- having figured out how to squeeze it in between two gigs, even.

And I gave it up. Not only because I got next to NO sleep on Thursday night, but also because there was something I really needed to do.

First- the no sleep. I don't know why it keeps happening, but I keep having problems downloading Mp3s of music that I'm being sent to learn for Rhianon. Every other place seems to get them fine, EXCEPT my home computer. New modem. New Disc Drive. But still, downloads that should take 17 minutes take an hour and are often interrupted several times by AoL just kicking me off for no good (that I can see) reason.
But I needed this stuff, and so I stayed up performing a good old-fashioned out-stubborning- hands down one of my most effective weapons against adversity. I succeeded, but I got very little sleep, which put back all of my plans for Friday.

Friday was also going to be expensive. It costs $50.00 to fill my van and with the crappy mileage it gets, we're talking $100 to go to a party.

But that's not what I fixed. For the longest time I've really wanted to be able to burn CDs on the computer. It's WAY cheaper and with a fast enough drive, I could burn 100 CDs in an afternoon where the CD recorder would take >50 HOURS. So we finally replaced the CD drive and it was all set to do that when I found that yet another glitch had gotten into one of my master recordings. It's barely noticeable and nobody has complained, so I'd been content to let it slide as I sold off the last of that last batch. But the more I thought about it the more I KNEW that my work does not deserve to be sold tagged by some digital vandal with a spray paint can full of 1s. So after painstakingly trying every option I could to try and fix it via an edit, I finally, on Friday, broke down and remastered the song. *I* can tell a couple of differences in the mix now, (mostly the glitch is gone- Hallelujah!) but I did a damn good job (if I do say so myself) of keeping notes on what I did and duplicating the sound and mix I had before.
I hated having to do this, but to finally know that I'm selling a CD that is the actual product I created and not just what I'm willing to accept after the vandals poked holes in it is a very big load off of my mind.

Then I went and uploaded the new and improved song, put the list of the other songs in the album in order and then hit "burn". My finished CD popped out four minutes later, and an hour after that, having listened to it once thru, I knew it was good and that I had entered into a very new and awesome arena for reproducing copies of my CD. Four minutes and no need for special "audio" CDs. In just one short hour, I was able to replace the remaining "glitchy" items in my current stock. Next week, I'm going to start a new big batch and be ready to make serious inroads towards selling my second 100 of them. I love it. My cost/unit goes down >50%, and the time/copy is 1/16th what it was. This is going to bode VERY well for when I have several different things to sell. This is also going to keep my net profit/unit fairly decent even while I keep my price the same. Yeah! Capitalism without the need for greed.

Another thing that got fixed this weekend has to do with a power I'm really looking forward to wielding for the cause of good. One of the promises of having Linux has to do this bit of software that can do "sound editing" which is something I've done on a computer before and a process for which a computer is much better suited than the equipment I prefer to use to record. Anyway, one of the things that this software alleged to be able to do is to do a "pitch shift" on a selected bit of sound and then afterwards it has a smart insert that compresses or stretches the sample to fit back into the same space that it came from. What this means is that under some circumstances, when my vocals on a recording go off pitch, that I may be able to isolate and FIX the bad note. So if I get an exceptionally good vocal take, with just a couple of slightly off notes, I might not have to spend hours "punching in" trying to fix things.

jmax315 came over on Sunday before the MDFF meeting and fixed the last remaining obstacle I had to using this software (my 'account' didn't have access to it).

I tried it out doing exactly what I described and found to my delight that it will do exactly what I thought, but I also found out that it might not work EVERY time or in every scenario, which is a drag, but still a net improvement. One thing I found that's really neat is that the software will analyse and compute what frequency the note you want to edit is, which is VERY useful. But to use that capability fully, I'm going to need to make a chart of the frequencies of the notes in my range. I've wanted to do this, for EQ purposes too, so this will be doubly useful, and now I have a double incentive to get on it.

The final sword removed from my head came yesterday. For along time, now, my van has had some wierd electrical problem where the lights on one side didn't work. Last week, on the way home from 3LF we were pulled over and issued a "repair order" for it. So yesterday, it's fixed, and while we were at it, the van got a much needed tuneup. What we didn't need was more $$$ being spent when we're also trying to fix Sonya's car after the accident.

Anyway, last week was vicious and stressful, and much of that seems to have passed, in favor of many of the sources of this stress being removed and tools put in place to make things go much better now.

This makes me happy, even though I'm still sorely disappointed that I couldn't make my friend's party.