[blacksuede58]

Hey all...

So after years of recording my band's gigs by bussing my ole Mackie
1604's subs down to a cassette 4-track, I'm taking a jump... I just
came came into a Mackie 1640i, which I'll FW out to my Dell laptop
(yes, a Dell-- Intel i3 with 4G RAM, Win7 64, 7200 500G HD) running
Audition3, and record the channels to an eSATA outboard drive (which I
haven't bought yet)... I'm thinking 12 tracks should be enough. But,
now I'm starting to wonder--

Is this even feasible? Can a single HD really write 12-16 tracks of
32/44.1 audio all the same time? I've looked at the eSATA transfer
rate and it's up to spec, as well as the spindle speed of the drive...
but jeez, it seems pretty much *way* too easy!

For a test, I ran a friend's Tascam US-1641 through my lappy's USB2
port, recorded 40 minutes of ten simul inputs into AA3, al on the C
drive... no skips...

I've got nothing installed on the lappy except AA3 (no other apps,
Wifi, antivirus, MS firewall-- nothing). It's totally barebones. My
only concern/curiosity is about the external HD being able to write
that amount of info... even at 7200. It just seems... unreal.

Somebody pass me a beer and tell me to stop worrying... unless I
should Thanks...

Mark.

[Arny Krueger]

"blacksuede58" wrote in message

Hey all...

So after years of recording my band's gigs by bussing my
ole Mackie 1604's subs down to a cassette 4-track, I'm
taking a jump... I just came came into a Mackie 1640i,
which I'll FW out to my Dell laptop (yes, a Dell-- Intel
i3 with 4G RAM, Win7 64, 7200 500G HD) running Audition3,
and record the channels to an eSATA outboard drive (which
I haven't bought yet)... I'm thinking 12 tracks should
be enough. But, now I'm starting to wonder--

Is this even feasible? Can a single HD really write 12-16
tracks of 32/44.1 audio all the same time? I've looked at
the eSATA transfer rate and it's up to spec, as well as
the spindle speed of the drive... but jeez, it seems
pretty much *way* too easy!


For those of us who have been recording 16-32 tracks since the days of
Pentium IIs and IIIs and 320 megabyte (note: megabyte, not gigabyte!!!) 5400
rpm PATA drives, your question very easy to answer.

Recording more tracks than you can imagine a practical use for on modern
hardware is indeed, "...pretty much *way* too easy!" People are doing it on
Netbooks. Slam dunk!

[Mike Rivers]

On 11/22/2010 9:47 PM, blacksuede58 wrote:

.. I just
came came into a Mackie 1640i, which I'll FW out to my Dell laptop
(yes, a Dell-- Intel i3 with 4G RAM, Win7 64, 7200 500G HD) running
Audition3, and record the channels to an eSATA outboard drive (which I
haven't bought yet)... I'm thinking 12 tracks should be enough. But,
now I'm starting to wonder--

Is this even feasible? Can a single HD really write 12-16 tracks of
32/44.1 audio all the same time?

No sweat. You can likely do twice that many if you had the
inputs, or go up to 96 kHz sample rate if you want, though I
wouldn't recommend it for starters, other than just to play
around and see if it works, and if you can hear a difference.

I'll warn you, though, that audio through Firewire is a bit
of a rocky road. You have a couple of things going against
you here and nobody can tell you in advance whether it will
work well right off the bat or not, or just what you'll need
to do to fix it.

You're running 64-bit Windows 7. This is the most unexplored
territory, and if you go to the Mackie Forums
http://forums.mackie.com/ you'll see that there are a number
of people having trouble. Of course it's only the ones with
problems who come to the forum. There are lots for whom
everything works fine and you rarely hear from them.

You're using a laptop, which means that you're likely to be
using a built-in Firewire port. All Firewire audio devices,
not just Mackie's, are kind of fussy about the Firewire
chipset that they're talking to. It's a thing about
standards not being standard enough so that everybody can
write a driver that will talk to anything well. You may need
to add an external (ExpressCard) Firewire adapter. Although
it will add to your cost, this is a good thing in that it
allows you to try one, and if the mixer isn't happy with its
chipset, swap it for another, and keep trying until you find
one that works. You can't do that with the internal Firewire
port.

There are all sorts of things in a factory Windows
installation that make looking at YouTube videos and using
social web sites easy but stand in the way of glitch-free
audio recording and playback. You may need to turn off some
programs, services, and hardware devices that are running by
default. Laptops can be a particular problem here since they
have some sort of power management that's constantly looking
at the battery to see if it needs charging (some do this
even when you're running on AC power) and of course they all
have wireless networking built in, which is always looking
for a WiFi signal. Look up "DPC Latency Checker" and run
that to look for problems.

For a test, I ran a friend's Tascam US-1641 through my lappy's USB2
port, recorded 40 minutes of ten simul inputs into AA3, al on the C
drive... no skips...

With a 500 GB 7200 RPM internal disk drive, I'd record
directly to that and use your external drive to store
backups of your work (and for sure, do that). It will be
perfectly adequate as you've already proven, and it
eliminates one more outboard device and connection.



--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[Scott Dorsey]

blacksuede58 wrote:

For a test, I ran a friend's Tascam US-1641 through my lappy's USB2
port, recorded 40 minutes of ten simul inputs into AA3, al on the C
drive... no skips...

I've got nothing installed on the lappy except AA3 (no other apps,
Wifi, antivirus, MS firewall-- nothing). It's totally barebones. My
only concern/curiosity is about the external HD being able to write
that amount of info... even at 7200. It just seems... unreal.

Somebody pass me a beer and tell me to stop worrying... unless I
should Thanks...

The good news is... the world has changed, and this kind of thing has
become much, much easier than it used to be.

The bad news is... the reliability of these things is pretty lousy. For
recording live performances that isn't always bad... you record every concert
on your tour and if you miss one or two songs here and there you still have
plenty of material.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Arny Krueger]

"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message

blacksuede58 wrote:

For a test, I ran a friend's Tascam US-1641 through my
lappy's USB2 port, recorded 40 minutes of ten simul
inputs into AA3, al on the C drive... no skips...

I've got nothing installed on the lappy except AA3 (no
other apps, Wifi, antivirus, MS firewall-- nothing).
It's totally barebones. My only concern/curiosity is
about the external HD being able to write that amount of
info... even at 7200. It just seems... unreal.

Somebody pass me a beer and tell me to stop worrying...
unless I should Thanks...

The good news is... the world has changed, and this kind
of thing has
become much, much easier than it used to be.

The bad news is... the reliability of these things is
pretty lousy. For recording live performances that isn't
always bad... you record every concert on your tour and
if you miss one or two songs here and there you still
have plenty of material. --scott

Let's tell the whole truth. IME the least reliable part of my live recording
setup is the nut turning the knobs and pushing the buttons - me!

My primary recorder for these gigs is a CD recorder, and the secondary is a
Microtrack. The CD recorder rarely fails due to bad media, but it does
happen. The Microtrack has been perfectly reliable. The tertiary backup is a
PC with a USB audio interface and its at least as reliable as the rest. I
still occasionally lose a group's performance, and the reason why is always
me.

[blacksuede58]

Hi Mike-- thanx for the abundance of info (thanx to everyone else,
too)... you've put my mind at ease... Yeah I'd done the initial test-
run of 10 tracks with the Tascam thing, but that wasn't recording the
band (actually, I just pointed 5 mikes per side at my desktop monitors
and recorded them blasting out Deep Purple "Made in Japan"... heh)

But when the Mackie 1640i opportunity came into the picture, with the
(utterly kewl) ability to stream 16 individual digital audio signals
to AA3, suddenly I started thinking "Uh, I'd better hold up and ask
some serious questions about what I'm expecting this laptop to do".
And hey, I feel lots better about the endeavor now (and a bit behind
the times too, ha).

***One other question, tho-- regarding this:***

With a 500 GB 7200 RPM internal disk drive, I'd record
directly to that and use your external drive to store
backups of your work (and for sure, do that). It will be
perfectly adequate as you've already proven, and it
eliminates one more outboard device and connection.

Pretty much everything I've read online holds up a conventional wisdom
that it's a bad idea to write multi-stream audio to the same drive as
the OS. I partitioned my 500G C: drive for a 350G E:, but then I read
a reply to someone who'd done the same thing; the reply was basically,
"won't make much difference-- you're still asking the same physical
drive to read OS and write audio". So that's why I was going for the
outboard drive... even though I'f already done the 10-track test to
C:, I was worried about that extra load of writing 16.

No sweat. You can likely do twice that many if you had the
inputs, or go up to 96 kHz sample rate if you want, though I
wouldn't recommend it for starters, other than just to play
around and see if it works, and if you can hear a difference.

This was when I started to feel good. I'm still drinking a beer... but
with a different purpose.

I'll warn you, though, that audio through Firewire is a bit
of a rocky road. You have a couple of things going against
you here and nobody can tell you in advance whether it will
work well right off the bat or not, or just what you'll need
to do to fix it.

Now here's where I reveal something tangential to the discussion, but
may make you roll your eyes and say "Oh OK-- this guy's not REALLY
serious, is he?" Well, not seeking your advice; just some anecdotal
background to my effort here.

I came into the Mackie 1640i on eBay at basically half-price, because
the seller was upfront about a potential issue with it: He'd
previously sold it to some church youth group, who brought it back to
him some time later with the simple claim that "the Firewire doesn't
work". But instead of troubleshooting it to find the problem himself,
or shipping it back to Mackie for repair, he just put it on eBay "as-
is", at a fraction of the street.

So yeah, I'm taking a bit of a flyer here... but because Firewire
*can* be such a tricky protocol to get going, I'm thinking (crossing
fingers) that the church youth group just didn't have the right
drivers, or couldn't/didn't configure their DAW the right way...
something basic like that, but beyond the grasp of somebody who just
expected to plug it in and have it work right away. In short, not an
issue with the board itself. That's the hope I'm going with... Both
my lappy (Win7) and desktop (XPHome SP3) have Firewire ports, so I'm
fairly confident I'll be able to get it sussed out.

You're using a laptop, which means that you're likely to be
using a built-in Firewire port. All Firewire audio devices,
not just Mackie's, are kind of fussy about the Firewire
chipset that they're talking to. ... You may need
to add an external (ExpressCard) Firewire adapter.

Something else the church group might have had problems with, without
realizing it... and yeah, something I might run into as well. (I know
that Mackie Firewire likes to see a TI chipset.)

You may need to turn off some
programs, services, and hardware devices that are running by
default. Laptops can be a particular problem here since they
have some sort of power management that's constantly looking
at the battery to see if it needs charging (some do this
even when you're running on AC power) and of course they all
have wireless networking built in, which is always looking
for a WiFi signal.

Yeah-- I've got my lappy stripped, no apps, power managment reset
(always plugged in), no net, no AV, no firewall... nothing. I even
remembered to kill the screen saver

Look up "DPC Latency Checker" and run that to look for problems.

I've seen screenshots of that, looks helpful.

I'll be going out Saturday to record our gig with the Tascam 1641 to
the lappy, to start... 10 tracks max (it only has 8 XLRs, so I'll have
to use a little Behr mixer to externally buss 4 vox down to a line
input)... but anyway, I feel a lot better about this digital
multitrack adventure I'm embarking on...

Again Mike (and to all)... thanks!

Mark.

[Mike Rivers]

On 11/23/2010 7:18 PM, blacksuede58 wrote:

I'd done the initial test-
run of 10 tracks with the Tascam thing, but that wasn't recording the
band (actually, I just pointed 5 mikes per side at my desktop monitors
and recorded them blasting out Deep Purple "Made in Japan"... heh)

It doesn't matter that you weren't recording the band. Well,
maybe it does. Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do. And if a band member is leaving the
country the next day and won't be back in the studio for 2
years, that's a guarantee that something will go wrong (with
his track only, of course).

Pretty much everything I've read online holds up a conventional wisdom
that it's a bad idea to write multi-stream audio to the same drive as
the OS.

That's because everything you've read on line is 10 or 15
years old (or is recently written by someone who read what
was done 10 years ago). That used to be the case, but with a
modern computer with 4 GB of memory, there's no need to keep
the disk drive busy swapping things between disk and memory.

I partitioned my 500G C: drive for a 350G E:, but then I read
a reply to someone who'd done the same thing; the reply was basically,
"won't make much difference-- you're still asking the same physical
drive to read OS and write audio".

But the thing is that you no longer are continually reading
parts of the OS because it's all in memory. The advantage of
reserving a partition for audio (or other applications) is
that you can clean it up easily, reformatting that partition
when it gets too messy. And you can re-format and re-install
the operating system in its own partition without affecting
your audio or other application data. So you haven't done a
useless thing.

On my 10 year old laptop with 512 MB RAM I use an external
(USB) drive for the rare occasions when I record with it
because it actually works better, but that's not your setup.

So that's why I was going for the
outboard drive... even though I'f already done the 10-track test to
C:, I was worried about that extra load of writing 16.

My experience is that the weakest link in a PC based system,
assuming there are no problems with the operating system or
drivers (and that's a pretty big assumption, but one that
can be dealt with) is cables and connectors, and power
supply and distribution comes next. The external drive is
simply not as reliable as the internal one because it's
external. And since you're looking at an e-SATA drive, it'll
be sharing the controller with the internal drive anyway. A
Firewire drive might have to share the Firewire bus with the
mixer's audio I/O, which isn't a good idea.

I came into the Mackie 1640i on eBay at basically half-price, because
the seller was upfront about a potential issue with it: He'd
previously sold it to some church youth group, who brought it back to
him some time later with the simple claim that "the Firewire doesn't
work". But instead of troubleshooting it to find the problem himself,
or shipping it back to Mackie for repair, he just put it on eBay "as-
is", at a fraction of the street.

Some people are up to (or into) attacking problems like
this, and others aren't. His loss is your gain. If nothing
else, it's still an excellent mixer even if you have to go
around its internal Firewire interface and use something
else. There ARE combinations that work, but because no two
PCs are alike (and you really can't make two alike unless
you build them yourself from the same components at the same
time) what works for one system may not work well for another.

So yeah, I'm taking a bit of a flyer here... but because Firewire
*can* be such a tricky protocol to get going, I'm thinking (crossing
fingers) that the church youth group just didn't have the right
drivers, or couldn't/didn't configure their DAW the right way...
something basic like that

There's only one driver, and that's what Mackie offers
(unless you're on a Mac, in which case it's what Apple
offers), and apparently there are some problems with the
Mackie i series and some versions of Core Audio. But some
people have it working, so you can, too, if you're patient.
At least you have two computers, and one with XP, so you can
probably at least be sure that there's nothing wrong with
the mixer.

... and yeah, something I might run into as well. (I know
that Mackie Firewire likes to see a TI chipset.)

That's another problem. The "TI chipiset" is more Net
wisdom. It used to be good wisdom, but that was 5 years or
more ago. But there's more than one TI chipset, and the
manufacturers of Firewire host cards and motherboard ports
keep changing to get the latest version (or the cheapest
part). A couple of years back I was recommending a SIIG
ExpressCard adapter and people had pretty good success with
it, but lately someone said he got one (same SIIG model
number) and he couldn't get it to work, but got some other
brand (chipset unknown) and that worked fine. Also, it's not
as easy as it used to be to find out what chip a card is
using. The don't usually advertise it - because if they
change parts, they'd have to revise the ad material. The
people who make these Firewire host adapters don't know or
care about audio. They make it work with disk drives and
video cameras.

Good luck on your recording session. It'll probably work
just fine. Then you'll switch over to the Mackie and
Firewire I/O. Keep your fingers crossed.

--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[blacksuede58]

On Nov 23, 8:00*am, "Arny Krueger" wrote:

For those of us who have been recording 16-32 tracks since the days of
Pentium IIs and IIIs and 320 megabyte (note: megabyte, not gigabyte!!!) 5400
rpm PATA drives

Heh... in all respect Arny, I believe you're having a bit of fun with
a n00b here.

I remember recording *one track at a time* into CEP 1.0 on a P4 733,
circa 1999. Rec/Play was no problem, single wavs in the Edit screen...
but trying to play the full 8-track layout in the Multi screen made
the box choke like Mama Cass. I can't imagine what streaming 16 live
44.1's would've done to it.

Obviously, YMMV... enviously.

Mark.

[blacksuede58]

Hey Mike--

Thanks, my assurance is now complete. My take-away from all this is
that I can now save the $150 I'd have spent on an external HD. It now
can be saved for better things, like... oh... the probable ExpressCard
issue. Or better mics. Or (best-case scenario), beer. Yay.

... And if a band member is leaving the
country the next day and won't be back in the studio for 2
years, that's a guarantee that something will go wrong (with
his track only, of course).

I know where everybody lives, and what their travel itineraries
are Nobody's living the state, much less the country. We're just
a bunch of white guys in our 40s-50s blasting our garage-vibe angst
out onto unsuspecting post-punk bar audiences in the strictly local
area. After the gig we all go home to our wives and kids and minivans
(well except me-- the only one unwed and unbred. NICE). Mostly, this
recording thing is just to get my decades-long recording-geek fix on.
And to laugh at our inevitable ****ups (which I could certainly fix in
mixdown... but usually won't, ha).

Other than that-- thanks for updating me on the "same-drive-as-OS"
thing, and all your other points... I feel a lot better about all
this. It's a sensation I will savor up until the point when, 4
minutes before our gig, my laptop suddenly refuses to recognize the
audio interface-- or something. I'll burn that bridge when I get to
it.

cheers,
Mark

[Bill Graham]

Mike Rivers wrote:
On 11/23/2010 7:18 PM, blacksuede58 wrote:

I'd done the initial test-
run of 10 tracks with the Tascam thing, but that wasn't recording the
band (actually, I just pointed 5 mikes per side at my desktop
monitors and recorded them blasting out Deep Purple "Made in
Japan"... heh)

It doesn't matter that you weren't recording the band. Well,
maybe it does. Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.

Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my car never
refused to start in the middle of the night while I was sleeping.....It
always waited until the next morning, when I had to drive to work, and then
(wouldn't you know it) it wouldn't start!

[blacksuede58]

On Nov 23, 11:09*pm, "Bill Graham" wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:

It doesn't matter that you weren't recording the band. Well,
maybe it does. Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.

Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my car never
refused to start in the middle of the night while I was sleeping.....It
always waited until the next morning, when I had to drive to work, and then
(wouldn't you know it) it wouldn't start!

Well, clearly I would blame your local neighborhood teen hoodlums who,
after booting your car in the middle of the night, joy-riding it
around for a while, and ditifully bringing it back to your driveway,
have then yanked your distributor cap off or something just for x-tra
yuks. Yeah, that's frikkin aggravating first thing in the morning.

Mark

[Bill Graham]

blacksuede58 wrote:
On Nov 23, 11:09 pm, "Bill Graham" wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:

It doesn't matter that you weren't recording the band. Well,
maybe it does. Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.

Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my car never
refused to start in the middle of the night while I was
sleeping.....It always waited until the next morning, when I had to
drive to work, and then (wouldn't you know it) it wouldn't start!

Well, clearly I would blame your local neighborhood teen hoodlums who,
after booting your car in the middle of the night, joy-riding it
around for a while, and ditifully bringing it back to your driveway,
have then yanked your distributor cap off or something just for x-tra
yuks. Yeah, that's frikkin aggravating first thing in the morning.

Mark

Yes.....Another strange thing I've noticed, is that my rollerball pen always
runs out of ink just when I'm trying to write something. It never runs out
when its just being passively carried around in my breast pocket. I think
that is very strange. I only want to write something about 1% of the
time.....You'd think it would run dry sometime during the other 99% of the
time.....

[Don Pearce[_3_]]

On Tue, 23 Nov 2010 22:40:16 -0800, "Bill Graham"
wrote:

blacksuede58 wrote:
On Nov 23, 11:09 pm, "Bill Graham" wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:

It doesn't matter that you weren't recording the band. Well,
maybe it does. Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.

Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my car never
refused to start in the middle of the night while I was
sleeping.....It always waited until the next morning, when I had to
drive to work, and then (wouldn't you know it) it wouldn't start!

Well, clearly I would blame your local neighborhood teen hoodlums who,
after booting your car in the middle of the night, joy-riding it
around for a while, and ditifully bringing it back to your driveway,
have then yanked your distributor cap off or something just for x-tra
yuks. Yeah, that's frikkin aggravating first thing in the morning.

Mark

Yes.....Another strange thing I've noticed, is that my rollerball pen always
runs out of ink just when I'm trying to write something. It never runs out
when its just being passively carried around in my breast pocket. I think
that is very strange. I only want to write something about 1% of the
time.....You'd think it would run dry sometime during the other 99% of the
time.....

A bit like the phone. Wrong numbers are never engaged.

d

[John Williamson]

blacksuede58 wrote:
On Nov 23, 8:00 am, "Arny Krueger" wrote:

For those of us who have been recording 16-32 tracks since the days of
Pentium IIs and IIIs and 320 megabyte (note: megabyte, not gigabyte!!!) 5400
rpm PATA drives

Heh... in all respect Arny, I believe you're having a bit of fun with
a n00b here.

I remember recording *one track at a time* into CEP 1.0 on a P4 733,
circa 1999. Rec/Play was no problem, single wavs in the Edit screen...
but trying to play the full 8-track layout in the Multi screen made
the box choke like Mama Cass. I can't imagine what streaming 16 live
44.1's would've done to it.

Obviously, YMMV... enviously.

I'm partially with Arnie here. Record up to 8 tracks on a Celeron 700
with 128Meg of RAM under Windows 95, with a monitor mix coming out in
stereo without glitching. Cool Edit Pro SE was the software, with track
massaging done in Cool Edit 96 as CEP SE had no effects built in. I had
to use the convolution reverb offline, though...

The trick was getting the hardware and interrupt settings correct, which
took a bit of card swapping.

That machine still works as well as it ever did under '98, though I've
got *much* better converters now on other machines.

I've also got a Pentium 233 laptop on a shelf here running 'Doze 98 that
will mix to stereo and play 8 tracks without glitching, though it can
only record two at a time due to limitations in the sound interface,
which is a WamiBox for those that remember them.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

[Mike Rivers]

On 11/23/2010 10:20 PM, blacksuede58 wrote:

Thanks, my assurance is now complete. My take-away from all this is
that I can now save the $150 I'd have spent on an external HD.

It's still a good idea to have an external hard drive to
back up your projects, but it needn't be a screamer. Buy a 1
TB SATA drive for about $50, put it in a USB case (about
$15) and you'll still have enough money to pay with Firewire
cards or put toward a new mic.




--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[Mike Rivers]

On 11/23/2010 11:09 PM, Bill Graham wrote:

Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.

Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my
car never refused to start in the middle of the night while
I was sleeping.....It always waited until the next morning,
when I had to drive to work, and then (wouldn't you know it)
it wouldn't start!

I just noticed last night that electric igniter in my gas
oven is getting cranky, just in time to not start the oven
in time to cook the Thanksgiving turkey.


--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[Neil Gould]

Mike Rivers wrote:
On 11/23/2010 11:09 PM, Bill Graham wrote:

Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.

Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my
car never refused to start in the middle of the night while
I was sleeping.....It always waited until the next morning,
when I had to drive to work, and then (wouldn't you know it)
it wouldn't start!

I just noticed last night that electric igniter in my gas
oven is getting cranky, just in time to not start the oven
in time to cook the Thanksgiving turkey.

Last weekend, our fridge decided that it was done after 20 years. To give
due credit to the engineers that designed it, its failure mode was to slowly
lose the ability to keep food cold, beginning with the freezer, so our food
was still good today. That warning enabled us to shop for a replacement, and
at the same time cut through a lot of sales chaff by insisting that it be
delivered no later than today, a criterion that only a few places could
meet. The new fridge arrived this morning, and we're good to go for
Thanksgiving (one more thing to add to the "thankful" list). ;-)

--
happy T.G.

Neil

[Mark]

On Nov 24, 1:40*pm, "Neil Gould" wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:
On 11/23/2010 11:09 PM, Bill Graham wrote:

Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.

Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my
car never refused to start in the middle of the night while
I was sleeping.....It always waited until the next morning,
when I had to drive to work, and then (wouldn't you know it)
it wouldn't start!


did you ever notice, that when you misplace something and are
searching for it...... that it always ends up being in the LAST PLACE
that you look for it..

Mark

[John Williamson]

Mark wrote:
On Nov 24, 1:40 pm, "Neil Gould" wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:
On 11/23/2010 11:09 PM, Bill Graham wrote:
Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.
Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my
car never refused to start in the middle of the night while
I was sleeping.....It always waited until the next morning,
when I had to drive to work, and then (wouldn't you know it)
it wouldn't start!


did you ever notice, that when you misplace something and are
searching for it...... that it always ends up being in the LAST PLACE
that you look for it..

And have you ever noticed that you rarely find it the *first* time you
look in that place?

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

[Mike Rivers]

On 11/24/2010 2:47 PM, Mark wrote:

did you ever notice, that when you misplace something and are
searching for it...... that it always ends up being in the LAST PLACE
that you look for it..

Always. Because once you find it, you stop looking for it.
But I've had John's experience, too, where I've looked where
it actually was, but just didn't look hard enough before
looking somewhere else. Lots.

--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[Bill Graham]

Mark wrote:
On Nov 24, 1:40 pm, "Neil Gould" wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:
On 11/23/2010 11:09 PM, Bill Graham wrote:

Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.

Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my
car never refused to start in the middle of the night while
I was sleeping.....It always waited until the next morning,
when I had to drive to work, and then (wouldn't you know it)
it wouldn't start!


did you ever notice, that when you misplace something and are
searching for it...... that it always ends up being in the LAST PLACE
that you look for it..

Mark

Yeah, but that only is true when you're young. At my age, it is in the first
place I look for it, only I don't see it, so I have to look everywhere else
before I finally come back to it. I have developed a few primary rules,
however. One is that when I first realize that something I normally have is
missing, I look for it right away. The chances of my permanently losing it
go up very fast with time. So, if I am drifting off to sleep, and realize
that something is missing. I get up, get dressed (if necessary) and go
looking for it. My wife says, "Why are you getting up at 3 in the morning?"
And I say, "My Swiss Army knife is missing." And she says, "Do you need it
to sleep?" And I say (truthfully) "Yes. If I don't look for it right now, I
won't be able to sleep, because I'll know that the chances of it being
permanently missing are going up all the time."

[blacksuede58]

On Nov 24, 11:36*pm, "Bill Graham" wrote:
Mark wrote:
On Nov 24, 1:40 pm, "Neil Gould" wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:
On 11/23/2010 11:09 PM, Bill Graham wrote:

Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.

Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my
car never refused to start in the middle of the night while
I was sleeping.....It always waited until the next morning,
when I had to drive to work, and then (wouldn't you know it)
it wouldn't start!

did you ever notice, that when you misplace something and are
searching for it...... that it always ends up being in the LAST PLACE
that you look for it..

Mark

Yeah, but that only is true when you're young. At my age, it is in the first
place I look for it, only I don't see it, so I have to look everywhere else
before I finally come back to it. I have developed a few primary rules,
however. One is that when I first realize that something I normally have is
missing, I look for it right away. The chances of my permanently losing it
go up very fast with time. So, if I am drifting off to sleep, and realize
that something is missing. I get up, get dressed (if necessary) and go
looking for it. My wife says, "Why are you getting up at 3 in the morning?"
And I say, "My Swiss Army knife is missing." And she says, "Do you need it
to sleep?" And I say (truthfully) "Yes. If I don't look for it right now, I
won't be able to sleep, because I'll know that the chances of it being
permanently missing are going up all the time."

When things go missing, I live by two constants:

1) The item is hiding in x number of reasonable locations. Yes, the
chances of it being permanently missing are going up all the time,
increasing the variables-- but the item still exists *somewhere* in
this plane of space and time. However, during the search, I will
finally draw a line. After a certain number of locations, there will
be no other place the item could reasonably be. After that point, I
would be wasting time looking in places that it could not possibly be.
The possibility that the item is in my sweater drawer is about equal
to the possibility that it may be in Boise Idaho: None. So at that
point, I write it off-- it's gone.

2) Much later on, I will find the item during a search for something
else. It will be in a ridiculously-impossible place. And at that
very moment, I will have a clear memory of purposefully putting it
there, and of my logical thinking at the time: "Ok I'm moving to my
new apartment, so I'll pack this mic in with my sweaters so it doesn't
get damaged."

Of course, this denouement has it own rules:

a) It will only occur days/weeks/months after the necessity for the
previously-lost item has passed; and
b) the new-searched item will not be found until such an equal amount
of time has passed, while I'm searching for something else.

I miss the days when everything I had to my name could fit in a goddam
duffle bag.

Mark

[Bill Graham]

blacksuede58 wrote:
On Nov 24, 11:36 pm, "Bill Graham" wrote:
Mark wrote:
On Nov 24, 1:40 pm, "Neil Gould" wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:
On 11/23/2010 11:09 PM, Bill Graham wrote:

Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.

Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my
car never refused to start in the middle of the night while
I was sleeping.....It always waited until the next morning,
when I had to drive to work, and then (wouldn't you know it)
it wouldn't start!

did you ever notice, that when you misplace something and are
searching for it...... that it always ends up being in the LAST
PLACE that you look for it..

Mark

Yeah, but that only is true when you're young. At my age, it is in
the first place I look for it, only I don't see it, so I have to
look everywhere else before I finally come back to it. I have
developed a few primary rules, however. One is that when I first
realize that something I normally have is missing, I look for it
right away. The chances of my permanently losing it go up very fast
with time. So, if I am drifting off to sleep, and realize that
something is missing. I get up, get dressed (if necessary) and go
looking for it. My wife says, "Why are you getting up at 3 in the
morning?" And I say, "My Swiss Army knife is missing." And she says,
"Do you need it to sleep?" And I say (truthfully) "Yes. If I don't
look for it right now, I won't be able to sleep, because I'll know
that the chances of it being permanently missing are going up all
the time."

When things go missing, I live by two constants:

1) The item is hiding in x number of reasonable locations. Yes, the
chances of it being permanently missing are going up all the time,
increasing the variables-- but the item still exists *somewhere* in
this plane of space and time. However, during the search, I will
finally draw a line. After a certain number of locations, there will
be no other place the item could reasonably be. After that point, I
would be wasting time looking in places that it could not possibly be.
The possibility that the item is in my sweater drawer is about equal
to the possibility that it may be in Boise Idaho: None. So at that
point, I write it off-- it's gone.

2) Much later on, I will find the item during a search for something
else. It will be in a ridiculously-impossible place. And at that
very moment, I will have a clear memory of purposefully putting it
there, and of my logical thinking at the time: "Ok I'm moving to my
new apartment, so I'll pack this mic in with my sweaters so it doesn't
get damaged."

Of course, this denouement has it own rules:

a) It will only occur days/weeks/months after the necessity for the
previously-lost item has passed; and
b) the new-searched item will not be found until such an equal amount
of time has passed, while I'm searching for something else.

I miss the days when everything I had to my name could fit in a goddam
duffle bag.

Mark

Amen to that. My mother told me years ago, that the freeist person she ever
knew was a girl who owned nothing but the clothes on her back. (and not very
many of those) She stayed at "the Y", and when she felt like going
somewhere, she just called her employer, quit, and got on the bus. Oh, to be
able to live like that......

[geoff]

John Williamson wrote:
Mark wrote:
On Nov 24, 1:40 pm, "Neil Gould" wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:
On 11/23/2010 11:09 PM, Bill Graham wrote:
Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.
Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my
car never refused to start in the middle of the night while
I was sleeping.....It always waited until the next morning,
when I had to drive to work, and then (wouldn't you know it)
it wouldn't start!


did you ever notice, that when you misplace something and are
searching for it...... that it always ends up being in the LAST PLACE
that you look for it..

And have you ever noticed that you rarely find it the *first* time you
look in that place?

I lost something and I've looked in every possible place at least three
times. I still haven't found it. What am I doing wrong ?

geoff

[Bill Graham]

geoff wrote:
John Williamson wrote:
Mark wrote:
On Nov 24, 1:40 pm, "Neil Gould" wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:
On 11/23/2010 11:09 PM, Bill Graham wrote:
Nothing ever fails when you don't need it, it
only fails when you do.
Yes. Isn't that strange. I noticed a long time ago, that my
car never refused to start in the middle of the night while
I was sleeping.....It always waited until the next morning,
when I had to drive to work, and then (wouldn't you know it)
it wouldn't start!


did you ever notice, that when you misplace something and are
searching for it...... that it always ends up being in the LAST
PLACE that you look for it..

And have you ever noticed that you rarely find it the *first* time
you look in that place?

I lost something and I've looked in every possible place at least
three times. I still haven't found it. What am I doing wrong ?

geoff

Could be several things.....I lost a Swiss Army knife a couple of years ago,
and I finally bought another one. Then, my wife found it underneath the
couch cushions where I usually sit while watching TV. Do you have young kids
running around the house? They will pick stuff up, play with it a while, and
then leave it wherever they happen to be at the time they get tired of
playing with it. But I have bad news. The problem will get worse as you get
older. At my age, I will lose something five minutes after I lay it down. I
keep a wooden box in the bedroom, and every night, before I go to bed, I put
everything I carry in my pockets in that box. There are exactly 12 things,
and I keep a list of them in the box, and every thing has its own number,
and pocket location. And I still lose stuff occasionally.

[John Williamson]

geoff wrote:
John Williamson wrote:


And have you ever noticed that you rarely find it the *first* time you
look in that place?

I lost something and I've looked in every possible place at least three
times. I still haven't found it. What am I doing wrong ?

Probably you're looking for it too soon. It's in a time warp and will
re-appear when you start looking for something else.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

[blacksuede58]

On Nov 26, 1:19*am, "Bill Graham" wrote:
blacksuede58 wrote:

I miss the days when everything I had to my name could fit in a goddam
duffle bag.

Mark

Amen to that. My mother told me years ago, that the freeist person she ever
knew was a girl who owned nothing but the clothes on her back. (and not very
many of those) She stayed at "the Y", and when she felt like going
somewhere, she just called her employer, quit, and got on the bus. Oh, to be
able to live like that......

Eh-- been there, for a couple zen-like years in the early 80's. That
was my aforementioned Duffle Bag Period: I was 23, working
occasionally at day-labor places in Orlando, and hitchiking around the
country whenever I had a bit of cake saved up. Yes it was "free" and
"liberating" and "off the grid", all those nifty romantic terms.

But it was also "occasionally not eating" and "getting hassled by
cops" and "stuck in the rain on some turnpike ramp outside Richmond
VA".

Once I settled in with some Ft Lauderdale friends, and got a job, and
they moved out and left me the apartment, the inevitable materialistic
encrustation started. Especially after I got my first little 4-track
Portastudio I haven't looked back.

Anyway-- I really *would* like to know where that other Oktava
MK-012-01 mic went. I had two, five years ago-- haven't used em since
then, and now I can only find one. Believe me, my search has extended
far beyond my usual "x number of reasonably possible" locations...

Mark.

[Sean Conolly]

"blacksuede58" wrote in message
...
On Nov 23, 8:00 am, "Arny Krueger" wrote:

For those of us who have been recording 16-32 tracks since the days of
Pentium IIs and IIIs and 320 megabyte (note: megabyte, not gigabyte!!!)
5400
rpm PATA drives

Heh... in all respect Arny, I believe you're having a bit of fun with
a n00b here.

I remember recording *one track at a time* into CEP 1.0 on a P4 733,
circa 1999. Rec/Play was no problem, single wavs in the Edit screen...
but trying to play the full 8-track layout in the Multi screen made
the box choke like Mama Cass. I can't imagine what streaming 16 live
44.1's would've done to it.

No, Arny's right. I've mixed up to at least 20 tracks at 32/44 on a single
core 1GHz system, with just a standard 5400 IDE drive, and no problems.

CEP (at 1.2) had an odd feature in the multi-track view where it would
continuously try to pre-mix sections before they were to be played, and with
enough tracks this would choke it till there was no recourse except to
reboot the PC. You could disable the feature by clicking on the green
progress bar in the lower left corner till it had a red X across it. Then it
would play back fine.

The moral of the story is that at these track counts you're not fighting the
disk I/O, you're fighting the other stuff going on in the background if
anything. I don't know how Windows 7 holds up to this, I just got a new
laptop with 7 and haven't had a chance to play with it much, but anything
that takes 1.2 G of ram just to boot is not giving me confidence.

Sean

[Bill Graham]

blacksuede58 wrote:
On Nov 26, 1:19 am, "Bill Graham" wrote:
blacksuede58 wrote:

I miss the days when everything I had to my name could fit in a
goddam duffle bag.

Mark

Amen to that. My mother told me years ago, that the freeist person
she ever knew was a girl who owned nothing but the clothes on her
back. (and not very many of those) She stayed at "the Y", and when
she felt like going somewhere, she just called her employer, quit,
and got on the bus. Oh, to be able to live like that......

Eh-- been there, for a couple zen-like years in the early 80's. That
was my aforementioned Duffle Bag Period: I was 23, working
occasionally at day-labor places in Orlando, and hitchiking around the
country whenever I had a bit of cake saved up. Yes it was "free" and
"liberating" and "off the grid", all those nifty romantic terms.

But it was also "occasionally not eating" and "getting hassled by
cops" and "stuck in the rain on some turnpike ramp outside Richmond
VA".

Once I settled in with some Ft Lauderdale friends, and got a job, and
they moved out and left me the apartment, the inevitable materialistic
encrustation started. Especially after I got my first little 4-track
Portastudio I haven't looked back.

Anyway-- I really *would* like to know where that other Oktava
MK-012-01 mic went. I had two, five years ago-- haven't used em since
then, and now I can only find one. Believe me, my search has extended
far beyond my usual "x number of reasonably possible" locations...

Mark.

Well, I don't know how old you are, but I can tell you that the main reason
the good stuff turns up missing, is because your, "friends" walk away with
it. Especially the younger kids. When I think of all the good stuff I have
had in my life, and have had to buy again and again. I wonder if I wouldn't
have been better off buying a bank vault for a studio when I was 20.

[Arny Krueger]

"blacksuede58" wrote in message

On Nov 23, 8:00 am, "Arny Krueger"
wrote:

For those of us who have been recording 16-32 tracks
since the days of Pentium IIs and IIIs and 320 megabyte
(note: megabyte, not gigabyte!!!) 5400 rpm PATA drives

Heh... in all respect Arny, I believe you're having a bit
of fun with a n00b here.

Not at all.

I remember recording *one track at a time* into CEP 1.0
on a P4 733, circa 1999. Rec/Play was no problem, single
wavs in the Edit screen... but trying to play the full
8-track layout in the Multi screen made the box choke
like Mama Cass. I can't imagine what streaming 16 live
44.1's would've done to it.

Obviously, YMMV... enviously.

Well that's it. Your mileage varied.

I *didn't* say that every P2-233 would record and play umpty-dump tracks
without any dropouts. However, I did a lot of no-sweat, no-dropout
recording and mixing of 24-ish tracks on a Pentium 666. I think that was a
high end P2. It was a very clean system - essentially purpose-built.

I migrated from there to a different I/O card on an Athalon 2000, which was
very problematical until I changed out that particular card. Then the Athlon
2K became a workhorse. Looked to me like there was some storage cancer
built into the problematical card's device driver.

The A2K was a nicer system to use, but I lacked enough audio channels to
make it misbehave. So, I don't know how many channels it would have done had
I tried to press the issue past 24-ish.

[Anahata]

On Fri, 26 Nov 2010 07:19:05 +0000, John Williamson wrote:

geoff wrote:
John Williamson wrote:

Probably you're looking for it too soon. It's in a time warp

a.k.a. back of the sofa...

and will
re-appear when you start looking for something else.

will re-appear the day you buy a replacement.

--
Anahata
--/-- http://www.treewind.co.uk
+44 (0)1638 720444