Since you are here, I’ll give you some filler material. I found it in my midden, alongside some French Toast sticks. Pudding-Tat is in a Judy mood again, a.k.a. caterwauling. I tried the phone company logic on her to no avail. What’s that, you say? Well, I explained to her the reason I cannot let her get pregnant is that a “certain percentage” of mothers don’t survive childbirth and I need her so much I can’t bear the thought of losing her. Phone company all the way! And caterwauling.It looks like the underpants of the real estate market are showing in Florida. Nothing is moving. Prices are still high but it is going to exhale any time now. My guess is 40% of “homeowners” were caught up in the frenzy and are about to pass Economics 101 at the top of the class.
I’ve procured a new musical instrument from Mike, the laptop guy. It is a 1999 IBM Thinkpad, which sold new for an eye-popping $4,500. Today, you can’t give them away, so the $50 price was a courtesy. What’s this about music? After the eventual success of the Toshiba on stage last week, I’m going to try to put a decent CD player on this puppy for stage work.
I sold again and would have sold more if one of the parties had left any room on their credit card. So you could say I’m chugging along at an excellent pace for the new guy. It is a good product, something I’d take myself. I’ve also discovered that there is a possibility of a cruises without a passport, providing I have a birth certificate with the raised seal. Yes, at the moment I have a surplus of those.
Backups and hard disk drives. You can bet I do not trust them and the brand new 80GB is acting up. (I use multiple smaller hard drives so when they crash, I lose less data. They are also easier to back up. It may be time to re-look at RAID technology. Last evening, I went to back up my music disks and my system balked. My first question is, if you have RAID (Random Array of Independent Disks), how do you configure the boot sequence? I’ll get back to you.
The backup is my music programs. There are umpteen of them, not just the 102 survivors that made it to my Farmer lists. (The Farmer lists are the ones I use on stage, rotated weekly in a very exact sequence to make sure I always have the newest copies. “Farmer” is coincidence, if this had been the next series of disks, they would have been called “Fishbed”.) For any budding soloists crazy enough to copy my act, read further to be aware of what you are up against. It is not enough to simply acquire a piece of music and play along.
There is an entire process for each tune that has to be learned by trial and error. While the software commands are self-explanatory, using commands to create coordinated sets is not, and you will find all software is geared for plodding along one tune at a time. Most problematical are compression errors, where two songs with the same settings playing hugely different volumes. (They come blasting through your PA system if you aren’t prepared.) You must add an intro, usually an abbreviated click track along with a few trade secrets I’m not saying.
The software I chose was freeware called “Audacity”, which works for most of my needs. It lacks a real equalizer and can’t remove vocals. Changing keys is a headache reserved only for the most essential music. Audacity creates huge files, and those files are in different formats and folders. Both must be saved in matching sets. This is what made data DVD a necessity. Even the vaunted new Blue disks holding 15GB would only do for now, even if I could afford them.
The good news is, I may have discovered an “error” that gives the Audacity tunes a full, lush mid-range no matter how thin and reedy the original sounds. Um, I’m referring to Johnny Cash, not Tiny Tim. Poser: does anyone know Johnny Cash’s middle name?
