Bill Roper's Journal

I went upstairs to do some light cleaning and putting things away. Part of this was making a box of dead electronics to go to recycling. As I was tossing things into that box, I found my old laptop that I had given to K and that she had given back to me well before she left for college. The power brick was with it, so I figured I'd plug it in and see what shape it was in.

Happily, it powered up and took a charge, so that was a good start. But it turns out this laptop is just a wee bit too old to be upgraded to Windows 11 and with only 8 GB of RAM and no further expansion capabilities, probably not worth fighting to upgrade. It is, however, a perfectly fine machine for certain purposes.

So I have installed Linux Mint on it, which is my first time doing this. (I have Zorin OS on a much older laptop that I mostly haven't touched in years. I looked at Zorin first and decided that Mint would be a better choice.)

The install was easy, although I had to use a different tool than the one they had suggested to make the bootable USB stick for the install. Happily, Rufus works for this.

And now, everything is up and running and I'm able to access the Internet and even post updates.

Like this one. :)

So it went like this...

The new baby gate arrived this morning. I dropped the old baby gate off at UPS over lunch and it is on its way back to Amazon. After work, I decided that I would see if I could quickly install the new gate and it turned out that I *could*, having figured out all of the problematic parts with the previous gate. The gate is now installed on the stairs and should, I think, prevent Calvin from coming upstairs. It does not *seem* to prevent Gretchen from coming upstairs, although it doesn't make the whole process any more pleasant. And Julie needs to see how to operate the gate so that she does not tear it down accidentally. I have called Julie and suggested a demonstration, which she has declined. I worry about this.

Meanwhile, the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter card for the Apollo 8 unit that I bought arrived from Sweetwater. It had come via USPS and the notice said that it was in the mailbox. This seemed unlikely and it was, as all of the mail had been left on the porch, because that box had no hope of fitting in the mailbox. I brought everything in and it was now time for dinner.

We have been keeping Calvin on an extra-long leash to keep him in the family room when he is not in his kennel, but after dinner, I decided we should let him roam free on the first floor and determine whether the new baby gate would keep him off the second floor. This cost us one wooden cooking spoon that had been used for dinner and which Calvin found while counter surfing. Ruby took it from Calvin and it died while I tried to take it away from Ruby without breaking it.

And then a little while later, Calvin went and laid an enormous load in the middle of the living room where he has been previously guilty of doing so. Great.

By now, I am *really* unhappy. I head back into the living room to turn on the lights and clean up the mess.

And I trip on Julie's suitcase, which is still sitting in the passage between the hallway and the living room where it has been for over a week since Windycon. I had been thinking that this stupid thing really needed to go upstairs. I had thought correctly.

Trips to the floor: one.

Swearing and shouting ensued, because I was unhappy with pretty much everyone in the house at this point, including myself. Happily, I don't seem have done any major damage to anything, so I was able to pull myself up on the stairs, get up, and clean up the pile of poop. In multiple trips to the toilet, but no more trips to the floor.

I had thought to drag Calvin to the living room and rub his nose in it, but he was having none of this, so I exiled him to his kennel. Then when I was done cleaning things up, I dragged the kennel full of Calvin to the living room, where he will remain until morning in exile there.

And then Gretchen and I finished watching our TV show. After that, I went to the basement to install the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter into the Apollo 8 unit. This is easier when the unit has not already been installed into the rack so that it can only be accessed from the floor.

Trips to the floor: two, but with more planning this time.

Taking the card out requires a lot of playing with a teeny, tiny Allen wrench (which I only dropped once). Then I discovered I couldn't lever it out with my fingernails, but I got Julie to come in and hand me the bit of metal that had once covered a expansion card slot in the back of a computer. That tool did the job nicely. The new card was installed, the screws put back in, the Thunderbolt cable that needed to go to the computer which I had carefully identified and rerouted was plugged into the Apollo 8, and -- as long as I was on the floor already -- I moved the rest of the cables on the assumption that this was all going to work.

I levered myself off the floor, walked through the procedure for registering the used Apollo 8 unit to my account, and all of that worked. Now, the only thing that needed to be done was to use the new, short Thunderbolt cable to connect the Apollo 8 unit to the Apollo Silver unit.

I called Julie to do this, because it has to be done underneath the console. She plugged the cable in and went back to her computer.

The Apollo Silver unit and the Satellite refused to pop up on the list of devices.

Ok, there is no reason this shouldn't be working, unless Julie has somehow plugged the cable in incorrectly. This means that I will need to inspect the cable install.

Trips to the floor: three. Once more with feeling.

Thunderbolt cables are finicky beasts and it turns out that Julie had twisted the Thunderbolt cable so that the lighting bolt was face up on the Apollo 8 and face down on the Apollo Silver. In her defense, I hadn't removed the cable wrap from the new cable and that was the way that it *wanted* to be plugged in. It was just wrong.

I unwrapped the cable, plugged it in correctly, and stuck my head out from under the console. Three devices were now present in the display. Yay!

I crawled back up into my chair, fiddled with things a bit more, discovered that all of my plugins were now recognized, and declared victory. I fired up Cubase, pulled up a recent project, and hit the playback button.

Everything sounded good. Very good. Probably better than before, which is what one should expect from the newer unit with the better converters.

So this project was a success.

I am going to go take some Aleve now.

Things I learned today, some of which I should have already known.

1) Before buying a new power strip, check to see if the GFCI that it is plugged into needs to be reset. If you bought the new power strip anyway, do this before unboxing and unwrapping it. (I will find a use for the new power strip some time.)

2) It appears that a Universal Audio Apollo unit with a Thunderbolt 2 interface card in it will not work on a Windows 11 system equipped with Thunderbolt 4, no matter what the very nice Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter thinks. This can be fixed by buying and installing a Thunderbolt 3 interface card in the Apollo system.

3) If you move the Monitor plugs back from the new Apollo unit to the old one, but don't move the ones that are attached to Line 1 and Line 2 *and* you have managed to set up your old Apollo system so that you are actually monitoring through Line 1 and Line 2 no matter what Cubase thinks is happening, you will not get any sound out through the speakers. This is fixed by getting back down underneath the console and moving the other pair of wires.

Things that I already knew:

1) I hate getting up off the ground after rewiring underneath the console.

Ah, well. Another learning experience. I'll be back on the ground installing the new interface card when it arrives. And then we'll see how everything works. :)

I'm now in the process of trying to upgrade my old office desktop computer to Windows 11. This is slightly dicey, because -- although I installed the correct TPM module -- the CPU is one generation too old to be on Microsoft's "approved" list. It does, however, have all of the currently required instruction set. And since there's no way to upgrade the CPU without upgrading the motherboard, this is where the system is pretty much stuck.

So we'll see how it goes. Making this more fun is that I'm connecting to the old machine via Remote Desktop from the new machine. We'll see what happens when the reboots start...

Gretchen has wanted a new puppy to be a companion for Ruby for a while. We went to a foster and looked at puppies and today we have an additional dog in the family.

He is an 11 week old hound mix who came to us with the name Calvin, which he will be keeping. He is very, very cute. And very, very hungry. He has also figured out that I am the feeder of dogs. :)

In other news, I have the two new monitors in the basement studio configured using a DisplayPort MST hub, but they periodically blink off. I am trying to figure out how to discourage this behavior, as it's simply annoying. So far, no luck.

On the other hand, when they aren't blinking, the extra screen is nice...

It is sad when the *second* worst thing that happened last night was Ruby getting skunked again.

I had plans to do a lot of recording this weekend. Now, whenever I need to do some recording, I usually wander down to the studio and discover that it is time to install a whole bunch of updates. It was pushing 9 PM, so I figured I could quickly run down to the studio, install the updates, and hit the ground running today.

I already knew that there was a Cubase point release that I should go ahead and install, so I did that. Then I noticed that there were three Intel updates waiting to be installed. Ok, I could take care of that too. No problem. A couple of reboots, but no problem.

The Intel update screen lists (among other things) my motherboard type and the current BIOS version. I looked at that and said to myself, "That BIOS is pretty old. I wonder if there is a newer one that I should install." This was my first mistake.

On the ASUS website, there was a brand-new BIOS for my motherboard, less than a month old. Looked good, so I figured I'd install it. This requires putting it on a memory stick, booting into the BIOS, and then loading it from there. I've done this sort of operation before, so I didn't have too much trouble with it. There was also a newer version of the Intel ME utility, so I installed that too. All good.

Having installed a new version of Cubase, I figured I'd fire it up so that it could inspect all of the plugins, because that sometimes can slow things down on the first restart. Still no problem.

Well, there was no problem until Cubase told me that I needed to pick an ASIO driver. It should just default to the Universal Audio Thunderbolt driver. Except I picked that and Cubase said "What Thunderbolt device?"

Oh, that is bad. Let me start up the UA application and see if it sees the Apollo unit. It does not. And the Thunderbolt cable is plugged in. Ack!

I start searching the Internet. Apparently, this is a problem with older versions of the ASUS Thunderbolt add-in card when the BIOS for this type of motherboard (and its various relations) gets updated. I check the Device Manager and it tells me that there is a problem with the Thunderbolt port. Yes, I had figured that out. Removing the device and putting it back does not help.

Maybe there is a newer driver or firmware for the Thunderbolt card. There's no new driver, but there is new firmware. I set up to flash the card with the new firmware and discover that it won't take it.

Apparently, there are *two* slightly different versions of this card. I have the older one, which will not take this update. There does not appear to be an update for the older card.

Maybe I can get a newer version of the Thunderbolt card. Micro Center does not carry this card. Amazon does. They can get it to me around July 1st, which is not compatible with recording this weekend. Or next weekend.

Ok. How can I get up and running? I *do* have a laptop with Cubase installed *and* a Thunderbolt port, but that is the same port that it uses for charging. About now, I realize that I could probably bodge things together with a Thunderbolt dock, but it was approaching midnight last night and I was running out of brain cells.

The latest generation of PC motherboards has a number of boards that support Thunderbolt directly on the back panel ports. My new office PC is one of those. I am not going to move my freshly-configured office PC to the basement for this. Really not.

I could *buy* a new motherboard. Which will require buying a new processor and new RAM. And a new heatsink. That is going to be annoyingly expensive and a whole lot of work, but is an available backup plan.

Let's try reverting to an older version of the motherboard BIOS. What version had I started with? Eventually, I realized that I still had it on the computer in installable format, so I copied it to the memory stick, rebooted, and installed the older BIOS. So far, so good. Let's boot up the computer.

The computer does not boot up. It beeps eight times. My phone tells me that this is a sign of a problem with the CMOS memory on the computer.

I am old. I know what to do about this. I shut off the power to the computer, pull the plug, and pull the CMOS battery. If I wait until morning, the computer will forget all of the BIOS settings and I should be able to get back into the machine. (Later, I check the manual and find the location of the two pins that I need to short to clear the CMOS. They are inconveniently buried behind the Thunderbolt card. I try fishing at them in the morning with a screwdriver, because why not? I'm not sure if I ever got to them...)

It is now nearing midnight and time to head up to bed.

At some point during this fiasco, Julie comes downstairs to tell me that Ruby has encountered a skunk, so if I smell something when I go upstairs, don't panic. It is apparently less bad than some of the previous skunkings. Gretchen has rubbed the dog down with some odor killer called "Pooph" and the report is that it has improved the situation. Gretchen, meanwhile, has gone off to the bedroom, having had enough of all of this for the night.

When I get upstairs, things are not *too* stinky, so I turn off the kitchen exhaust fan and head upstairs to join Gretchen. It is a *long* time before I can manage to get to sleep (which includes watching another episode of "Leverage" so that we can both wind down).

This morning, I get up, get cleaned up, and head down to the basement. I fish around for the clear CMOS pins, decide that I am not going to remove the Thunderbolt card to try to get at them right now, and put the battery back in. Then I fire up the computer.

Happily, after a mild round of complaints, it boots into the BIOS. I turn the Thunderbolt support back on and reboot. Windows fires up, I start the UA application and it informs me that there is no Apollo unit attached.

Then I plug the Thunderbolt cable back in. And now I have a connection! And there is much rejoicing.

And then I fire up Cubase and it tells me that there is no device connected. So I fire up the UA Console app, see the message "Connecting to Apollo", and now Cubase can see the device and lets me select the Thunderbolt ASIO driver. I open up a song, hit play, and there is sound from the speakers.

My mood is *greatly* improved.

So, kids, this is why you just shouldn't mess with a system that is working. Just ask old Uncle Bill.

In other news, the house still smells mildly of skunk downstairs and we are trying to air it out. Ruby does not seem to be very skunky, for which I am thankful.

At least I didn't have to run out and buy peroxide last night.

I have a file that is loading up one way in one release, but which is loading up differently in a different release. As far as I know, we didn't make any changes to the file loading. However, the good news is that after much effort, I now have debugging versions of both environments to load the file into, which means that with sufficient persistence, I should be able to figure this out.

Assuming that the combination of code and data is deterministic. That's normally a pretty good assumption, so I'm hoping it holds here.

Fingers crossed.

I built myself a new computer on Thanksgiving weekend. Today, I copied all (I think) of my current data files over from the old computer and am switching to the new box as my primary home machine.

We'll see how this goes -- and what I've forgotten!

It's easy to record a track down in the basement studio. Really. Yeah.

Ok, this reminds me of why I decided to record a couple of scratch tracks up here in the office. But it got better.

It didn't start well. I had gone down to the basement earlier in the evening and discovered a fair amount of disarray in the recording booth. I'm not sure why, but I have children, so that's always a leading suspect. I saw that the new mic was mounted on the stand that I wanted it on for vocals, but there wasn't a guitar mic in the room.

Before I started doing final renders for other tracks on the album, I decided to hunt down the guitar mics. I found a bunch of the cheap Marshall mics, but I remembered having bought a better pair of small diaphragm instrument mics some years back. They weren't in the mic locker though. Hmm.

I started poking around on the bookcase and found a box of small reel-to-reel tapes of some origin or another. And under the box was a big wooden box with two still-unused small diaphragm instrument mics in it.

I really need to do more recording in the studio. And I have another album that I should be working on that calls for that. But I digress...

Anyway, I finished rendering all of the other tracks on the album and went upstairs for dinner. After dinner, it was off to the basement with the guitar (in case), the lyric sheet, and my iPad. I repositioned the mics, because I planned to do this standing up, adjusted the music stand, cleared the space for my iPad, and then said "Where is the guitar stand?"

There had *been* a guitar stand in the room the last time I was there. It was not there now and it was something that I really wanted, so I went out and found it disassembled on top of the pool table. Why? I don't know. So I put that back together, put it back where it belonged, and then got the guitar out of the case and took it off to the room.

Happily, the guitar was still nicely in tune for not having been touched since Windycon. Ok, let's go get the iPad remote working.

I had downloaded Avid Control the last time that I had to do recording in the studio, because the Cubase remote app was just broken in so many ways that it was both unusable and unprintable. But I had noticed that a new version of the app had come out, so I figured I'd update the iPad to that version and see what happened.

When I went to the App Store, I was informed that they needed my password, which I provided, which was followed by my being told that I needed to go enter my password in Settings, which was followed by a demand for my phone number, which I entered, which was followed by a text message to my phone with a code that I needed to enter, which I *would* have been able to enter much more easily if the iCloud app hadn't kept coming up on top of that window asking for my password, and then after I entered the code, I was told I would need to make a new password, which I did, and then I could finally go back to the Cubase app page where I discovered that the app had been automatically updated at some point.

But I didn't come here to talk about that. I came here to talk about the draft...

(No, I didn't, but this was starting to feel like "Alice's Restaurant" there.)

Anyway, I downloaded the Steinberg SKI remote software and updated it, went into Cubase, activated the remote, connected the iPad to the computer, and amazingly, everything worked. This was good, because if I had just gone through all of that to see things fail, I would have been very unhappy.

I pulled up the UA Console, powered up the mics, and set some trial levels which at least got signal. Then I had to figure out what was wired up correctly in Cubase, because Cubase was hearing nothing, which turned out to be just a matter of setting up the hardware routing.

Ok, let's go record.

Since the original album had been two tracks direct to tape, no punch-ins, no saving throw, I figured I'd do the bonus track the same way. It's a two minute song. How hard can it be?

It's a two minute finger-picked song. Harder, as it turns out. I had a ludicrous number of false starts, but that's ok, because you just reset and start again. I wasn't trying to synchronize with anything, so I wasn't messing with headphone mixes. I was just playing.

Cubase tells me that I pushed the record button 18 times doing this. I think there were only six or so complete takes and I finally decided that the last one was good. I rendered it, compared levels to the existing tracks around it (all good), and then compared the levels to Clif's bonus track.

Clif's bonus track was substantially less loud than the surrounding tracks. Grump.

I opened Cubase back up, adjusted Clif's levels, compared it to the surrounding tracks, and rendered it again.

At this point, I need to duck over to WaveLab and apply the opening and closing fades. Then I can assemble the album, burn a CD to test with, and make the DDP master.

And if everything is good, I can upload this to the duplicator.

But that will be *tomorrow's* project.

I ran down to Micro Center this morning and picked up the bulk of the parts for the new computer, so I guess I'm committed at this point. I ordered the M2 drives from Amazon this morning, because it saved me a few dollars and let me use a gift card that I've been sitting on since I got my new phone. The case is supposed to arrive from Newegg on Friday, so all of the parts may be in order for a Thanksgiving weekend computer assembly. (Except the OS. Still need to grab an OS.)

There are a silly number of things that we need to do around the house. I think I'll go down and consult with Gretchen and see what we should take a run at. :)