Maugorn

So- the reason for last night's technical failure at Spotlight Coffee? A cable. A speaker cable.
Very strange as the speakers did click/pop when the amp was switched off. Ground wire was the failure I guess.

The cable started out it's life as a dollar store extension cord. Well, not really a dollar, but you get the drift.
They looked like a real bargain, and I snapped some up for MDFF a few years ago. Turns out that they had grounded plugs but no actual ground wire, which was revealed when these crappy plugs popped off as soon as you tugged on them. Nice-... NOT! Well, rather than waste them, I tried to repurpose them as speaker cables. The heavy orange jacket would make them visible and durable- or so I thought.

So, since the cable in question was an "extra", I chose it to be the recipient of the new style connector for the new amp. I mounted the connector and I tested the cable yesterday and it tested as working.
But when I tried to use it last night, mere hours later, it failed. And when I tested it today, it still failed.
And as I recall now, once before when I tried to use it (pre new connector) as a speaker cable it failed, but then tested ok when I got it home.

Well well well.

I think it's failed enough. I *tried* to give it a working purpose, and it has rewarded my effort with non-functionality when the chips were down. I *HAVE* loyal gear and equipment, and yes, it's failed too.
But this is different. This is not like the old PA amp that still works, even tho half of it's connectors and one of it's channels have failed.

You work for me? You TRY. That's all I ask. And if you serve me well and then fail under the duress I put on my stuff, you retire in dignity, and each of your scars is a point of pride and an adventure you survived. You DO NOT nearly ruin a gig for me after testing as functional.

The plans for this cable's dramatic immolation are being drawn now. There will be no mercy.

I'm *gonna* win this little fight, but it's going to be still more complex and annoying than I hoped, and yet it's so simple.

Under the *last* incarnation of my computer, I had the means for Audacity to export my work as .mp3 files. This is a very necessary thing if I want to sent audio *out* as .wav files are usually too big and Verizon won't send them for me.

So sharing audio with friends and soon uploading audio to my website dammit is going to require me to be able to convert my audio to mp3.

(I know I know, I don't like mp3 either, but it's a standard and it's easy to pass around).

So there's a plugin file that you have to down load and install. There *isn't* one for my version of Audacity on Linux, so there's one annoyance.

And I downloaded and followed the instructions for doing it on the Windows partition and it says it's there, but Audacity doesn't think so.

Grr.

So I thought I'd bypass that stupidity and do it on one of the other audio applications that came bundled with my E-mu card. And none of *them* seem to want to do it either!

Grr.

The easiest thing to do will be to fix Audacity or find some free converter program.

I. WILL. WIN. THIS.

But listen up Universe. You keep sending me the message that I need to mellow out and not go on destructive rampages. You know, that's a LOT less likely to happen if I get a fucking break on the stupid small stuff once in a while.

It's not like I'm asking for alot this morning and it would mean a whole lot to me if stuff just worked for a change.

My earnings at Pennsic having been excellent (despite the odds and my illness), I have invested some of my earnings in some things that I feel I have earned. And I splurged a bit too!

1) "Adri's Dreamflute" in ABS plastic. Back when I was recording Patches I bought a wooden recorder, that I used for the recordings and at occasional gigs afterwards. It's called "Adri's Dreamflute" and is a tweaked version of a large bore rennaissance recorder. The tweaks give it an extended range and sensitivity. I LOVE this recorder, but alas, don't take it out of the house much, because, well, my musical lifestyle is "harsh". Okay, it's downright brutal. My instruments are abused almost as much as I am for the privilege of accompanying me on my musical adventure. So when I *do* want to play it, I alwasy need extra time to warm up, because it's a little bit tricky to milk the highest notes out of it. And since I don't have the time to do that much recorder *practice*, I just tend to stick with the Yamahas, because I can (almost) play them in my sleep. So imagine my delight when I discovered at Pennsic that they're now making *THIS EXACT RECORDER* in ABS plastic. So I gots me one. It had it's debut at PPR last Saturday.
Oh, wow! It's response is a little easier than the wooden one, and it's tone is just a little (almost unnoticeable) less fine.
If I were perhaps the recorder player in Manneheim Steamroller, I could probably tell better, but you get the point.
So for $30 I got a plastic recorder that I can abuse that can really dish out the sound and tone as well as take the abuse.
It sounds better and it's even LOUDER than my Yamaha! I could have spent ten times this much on a recorder and not been as happy!

2) I bought a green flute. I'm currently teaching myself to play regular orchestra style flute, and have one that I like okay. BUT I discovered that some manufacturers have taken to a process that colours the metal. These flutes don't have a great rep for quality, but dammit, they're *pretty*. I own so few instruments that are just pretty. The tone on these guys is supposed to be decent as is their playability. We'll see. If it sounds nice and plays okay, then I have a 2nd tier instrument in my arsenal that's a pretty metallic green with silver keys and fittings. It won't pass for "authentic" in SCA or Renfest settings (unless I'm playing middle eastern music- see previous post to get the joke), but so what? It's *pretty*, and pretty is a reason I don't get to indulge much in in my musical gear.

3) I bought a new digital recorder to transition away from Minidisc when recording my gigs.
Don't get me wrong, I like my minidisc recordings. But I've ruined three recorders (two walkman, on full sized) so far, and minidiscs are getting harder to find, AND in order to do this, I need power and a mixer as well as the recorder.
The Zoom H4 replaces all of that, and records directly into .wav format, AND has built in mics if I don't want to plug my mics in AND has multitrack/overdub capability AND runs on two AA batteries (alkalines giving it ~8 hrs of use) AND (The BIG seller) it has a USB interface such that I can upload files directly, so no more three hour dubbing sessions before I get to edit.
It records onto SD flash media and I bought two 8GB sized cards yesterday that (if the rumours are true) will give me over 4 hours time apiece at 44.1k/16bits (CD quality) stereo.
So, for instance, if I wanted to try again to record at that Beast & Boar, instead of needing to lug the mixer and the MD and the cables AND extension cords in the huge heavy mixing board case, I'd need just two mic cables, my mics, and a stand.
It's small enough too, that I'd not even need an extra table for it.
I'm hoping to try it out this weekend at Constellation Books and the following weekend at Swamp Thynge.
This purchase is truly revolutionary, and I got all the parts of it (the recorder and the disc) for about $50 less than most places advertise it for, simply by doing some aggressive price checking.

4) I ordered the Decemberists' album The Hazards Of Love (which we have) on, get this- LP!
They put out a special gatefold LP edition of the album. This is very indulgent of me, but I LIKE records, and to have one of my favorite modern bands on an actual record is a sweet treat. Yum!

5) A dear old friend recorded Roy Harper's Stormcock for me on a cassette many aeons ago. That cassette died sometime before we moved here to Cheverly. I've been looking for it ever since and nobody but nobody seems to carry it on CD and I just got tired of waiting to see if I'd find it some day somewhere. Dammit, we have intarwebz for this shit, so I went on and found a copy and ordered it. Ta-da!
There are some other albums I had on cassette back in the day that I have lost, most in one of two great disasters:
"The Great Car Flood" or
"The Great Ripoff"
that I didn't have in any other media, so they are still lost to me. I have decided that I will be spending some of my extra pocketmoney this year finally recovering what's left of that list. Most I have back now, but some I don't, and it's really time to fix this grudge a (some of which is over 20 years old) and move on, now that the time is here where "If you want it, someone online has it for you".

6) I've purchased a few other CDs and DVD's too. They're not quite as newsworthy as the other purchases.

There are a few more items left on the list to go, I may not get or find them all, but this is fun:

- New rims for my van (well, used ones actually) of the smaller size that fit my lug pattern. Why? Because the size I have now is weird, exotic, and nobody seems to make that size tire anymore, not with anything resembling traction in mud.
I *could* keep paying hundreds of dollars extra for tires that suck and get me stuck in fields when I park for an event, or I could pay some extra money now for rims for cheaper tires that actually work for me. Hmm.

- A vibro-slap. (No, it's not anything like *that* gutterminds, even if it sounds like fun) It's a musical percussion device that makes a prolonged series of tiny tinny clacks in rapid succession when you hit it. It figures prominently in the opening of Traffic's "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys".

So sometime back I established that the great big hard drive for all of my audio project was feasible. If I put all of my gigs and albums on one big hard drive (with periodic backing up to CD), I could access it equally easily from both the Windows and Linux partitions.
And in the meantime, my main hard drives would be free for all the other stuff I do and I wouldn't have space issues there as the price of admission to get into audio on my computer.
So it all worked, and worked decently well.

All I needed to do was to now find a great big hard drive that wouldn't just be consumed as soon as I put all the projects on it. The external 60gb Iomega drive from my uncle almost fit the bill, but I filled it up as soon as I got all of my gig recordings on it. AND it turned out to be be a bit unstable when it was that full. Boo!

So then I got a drive off of Ebay, and for quite a bargain, I thought I'd be okay.
Nope. All it does is go "click click click click click click click click click click whirr," but then never shows up anywhere. So, once I had some income from Spoutwood, I broke down and bought a brand new 500gb drive from Microcenter.

First it went clickclickclickclick and never showed up anywhere. jmax315 suggested that I *had* in fact acquired two crappy drives in a row. madbodger provided a second opinion that *maybe* the little power supply that came with the external USB hard drive adapter thingie just wasn't studly enough to power a really big drive.
So I dug up a pile of old PC power supplies, and couldn't find one that would work w/out a motherboard. Someday I'm gonna have to figure out how to bypass that, because these are perfectly good power supplies with a zillion and one uses, and it really should not be this difficult to make one work "outside the box".

Not to be thwarted, I broke down and bought a Y/extension for the power cables inside my computer and ran the cable out of the computer and hooked the great big brand new hard drive to it... and...
...
It started smoking.
Boo!

I established that there was, in fact nothing wrong with the power by powering up a different drive, and then headed over to Microcenter hoping that they would not give me grief when I tried to exchange this headliner of the "bathtub-shaped failure curve" for a drive that actually worked.

Again, they have proven themselves worthy. The fellow who dealt with me was smart, courteous, understanding, and very willing to replace the drive AND send it back to test that it worked for me. I like Microcenter. They seem to have everything one could want, knowledge of it, and are willing to sell it to you for not alot of money. They *will* try to "upsell" you stuff that's more expensive if you're trying to do things on the cheap, but WTF, selling is their job, y'know? And they back off when you insist on staying within budget, so it's not so bad to be offered options if they exist. Anyway, they're everything that CompUSA facilely pretended to, with much less bullshit too!

And now the great big new hard drive is sitting on top of my computer, chirping happily and humming away as all of my audio projects are being uploaded to it. It's taking a stoopidly long time to do, as there do seem to be an awful lot of very big files, but once it's done, my audio work will be streamlined and I probably won't have to worry much about storage space for at least a year!