It's alive!!!!
posted on 29 Nov 2006 under category News
Not this blog, obviously, since this is the first post in over a month.
But, rather, it’s Bellum Aeternum that’s alive.
(And that, hopefully, is the sound of hundreds of Rampage fans and blog readers forgiving my long silence on all fronts…) I’ve belabored the lack of free time I’ve had since my second spawn was born, so I won’t reiterate. After all, I still found plenty of time to play the Diablo 2 version of whackamole, read a lot of books, watch a lot of TV, etc. etc. etc…. It became clear to me that my own allocation of time was just as much my fault as the kids. So, I started forcing myself to give up certain timewasters and, instead, work on music at least a few minutes each day - from picking up the guitar for rudiments or riff-noodling to programming drums and such.
And, when home with free time and my wife not e-shopping, putting the finishing touches on my PC’s resurrection.
See, what happened back in April when my PC ‘died’ was that some of the OS files just became so messed up that the PC wouldn’t boot. The data was all there on the hard drives, but the PC wouldn’t start. The really frustrating part was that I was planning to export the just-recorded song files to transportable Sonar .CWB files, which contain ALL of the song’s data (from midis to waves, including track assignments, effects settings, etc.). If I’d done that, the resurrection would have been much easier. As it was, the Sonar program files were in one spot, the project files in another, the audio in still another, and so on. Since I had two internal hard disks, though, I was lucky with the ability for a ‘brilliant’ workaround.
Using Bart’s PE (a LOVELY little tool that creates a virtual PC in your RAM, so that you can access ANYTHING on ANY of the hard disks, even if the installed OS is dead as a doornail), I managed to move all the data to one spot on my mostly-empty second HD, then reformat and reinstall the OS on my former primary drive. Then all I had to do was reinstall all my audio software, the recording soundcard and appropriate drivers, utilities, apps, all of my extra sound FX plugins… It took forever trying to find everything (I just sort of haphazardly dumped everything into a ‘SAVE THIS!’ folder without indexing or systematizing it), but after a few hours over the past thanksgiving weekend I managed to stumble through getting it all installed.
Then, once the Studio setup was complete, the last step was to see if the file move-rename trick would work to put the song files back on the ‘active’ list. I’d been dreading this, since Sonar’s method of file management is less than ideal for transporting files from PC to PC (or death to life). Basically, the Project file is just an index, which uses an esoteric jibberish system of naming the ‘wa0’ files that it dumps in the audio folder. And, if any path names or file names were wrong, I feared what it would do when I tried to reopen those project files. Would all those sleepless weeks of midnight recording sessions go bust? Straight to the recycle bin? Wandering in ‘what the hell is this filename’ hell?
Well, on Friday 11/24, I got my answer - it worked! I put the archive folders back where they went, changed the folder names to make the ‘new’ ones dormant and the archive ones ‘live’, then opened up ‘01_rbow.cwp’ and crossed my fingers. The familiar grid of timecodes and wave file pictures came up, and when I pressed play I heard the sweetest sound I’d heard in months - my own fingers on my SG, wailing out the solo to Rainbow Skies, while my V held down the rhythms and my P-bass handled the low-end duties.
There are still some static issues during playback, related to me not quite having enough memory to handle playback flawlessly. I’m sure there are just some settings I need to tweak somewhere. Also, some of my recordings are scattered across multiple takes that I hadn’t decided between and cut into the final song versions. But that’s all details. The MAIN thing is that it all works - My studio is ALIVE!
Now if only I had the free time to finish the mixing and shit. But xxx-mas is just around the corner.
I love this time of year…
(I treasure posts like this, infrequent though they are, because they paint such a broad picture of where I was back then. Even though this was mostly technical details, it told me a lot about what was going on then - the lack of time, having to share a half-resurrected PC, not being able to write anything musically because I had no scratchpad beyond my archaic laptop. This was about half a year before I got the new PC and Sonar 6, which fortunately is much smarter about internal file naming. And also much easier to export bundles with.)