Tech creep and the death of history, part 2: the dell dimension
posted on 05 Apr 2014 under category History
In December 2000 we moved from our first house to our current one, an upgrade in every way. It was inevitable, and necessary, that my computer get an upgrade as well. In something like 3 years PC processors had gone from the ‘blazing fast’ 166 MHz to pushing something near 1GHz. Video was improving, hard drives were doubling and quadrupling in size, memory prices were falling like a rock… well, not really on the last one - what was happening was that the same dollar was buying you 2 to 4 times the RAM than it was just a few years before. So, after crunching taxes at the start of the new year we got a decent refund and a good chunk of that went to buying my second desktop machine, a Dell Dimension 4100.
The Dell was a major step up in every department:
It also had some of those newfangled USB ports and a much better video card - which was nice, since the computer package also came with a nice 19” CRT monitor. I think I upgraded the video card anyway, an nVidia GeForce TI4200. The stock soundcard was crap, but that was okay since I transplanted the Soundblaster. Some would say the only downside was the OS. It happened to be that this computer was built for me during the few months between Windows 98SE (well-regarded) and Windows XP (well-regarded), when Microsoft was bridging the gap with Windows ME. For all the troubles people reported with it (including my father-in-law, whose upgrade from 98SE to ME was a mother of a headache that went on for months), I actually never had any problems with it.
This one upgrade ended up causing me to upgrade a lot more, as the newer, faster processor with more memory ended up showing the flaws in my old soundcard, my old recording software, and my old drum program. Magix, my midi programmer and multitrack recording software, wouldn’t synchronize the files properly when playing back, so I had to switch to Cakewalk 7. While that fixed my sync problem, the drum program would lag intermittently when using soundfonts on my old Soundblaster sound card, and so I needed a new way to render drums. After trying a program called WaveMaker, hacking the .ini file to use my own samples from the demo version, I ended up using TiMIDIty, which is a dos-based renderer that nevertheless worked wonderfully, especially with Gravis Ultrasound patches.
My drum-sync problems were a thing of the past, but I would still hit the occasional snag with recording file synchronizations. Nothing sucks worse than ripping out a great guitar track, doubling it up, and then having to trash the second track because latency caused the whole thing to be out of time. In particular this messed up one entire song from the Death Beast demo in 2002. Again, I had to go back to the drawing board, and after some research (and input from ChorazaiM, who was going through the same studio-upgrade issues I was), I settled on the AudioTrak Maya44 recording card.
This was from a time just before soundcards with plug-in external modules became all the rage. The Maya44 was built with an ultra-low latency and very good signal:noise ratio, and it ended up being by far the best card I ever recorded with. At the time it was state-of-the-art, so much so that when I moved from Cakewalk 7 up to Sonar 2 (not because of anything being outdated, but rather just for the newer features), I had no issues at all with it. This was the setup I used for Displeasures and Crimson Frost, which ended up being the most pain-free and quickest recordings I’ve ever done at home. The first Death Beast album was also done on this, and while that session did have some share of problems, none were really from the hardware I was using.
So, for the itemized list of what I recorded on this machine:
If memory serves me correctly, I also recorded the last of the Rampage unreleased tracks on this old machine before building my current machine, but that leads to part 3, which we’ll have to get to on another day. Suffice it to say that history did not die, yet…
(And here is where kayfabe bites me in the ass - because I had to pretend that Death Beast was its own thing and not just Rampage in another face and with a different pen, I didn’t document as well the exact dates of recording sessions and such. I can piece it together, I think, and maybe I will, but I didn’t leave myself bread crumbs the way I did with all of the old Rampage stuff.
Oh well. As Father Elijah said about the Sierra Madre Casino, “Finding it…That’s not the hard part. It’s letting go…”)