Bill Roper's Journal

I have now posited that there is an "escape room" theory of computer user-interface design. The object here is to hide the controls that are required to perform a particular function so that you must carefully search the entirety of the user-interface to find the correct menu selection or button to press to get your work done.

I am not sure why this is a good idea.

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!

My Synology NAS sits on my desk and the fans have been spinning up to high speed noticeably often in the last week or so. I tried brushing some of the dust away, but the problem didn't go with it, so today it was time to power down the NAS and clean it out.

I removed all of the hard drives and then wiped and blew the interior dust away. (Achoo!) Then I reassembled everything and powered it up.

So far, so good, but we'll see how it behaves when there's a bit more load.

The sound problems were largely corrected in today's show and everything was much more audible than it had been before. There was one brief mic malfunction which (per K) mysteriously corrected itself without anything being done to it, but other than that, everything was fine and it was a lovely performance. (I'm suspecting that the headset mic got knocked a bit out of position and then got moved back to where it was supposed to be, but I could be wrong. It had that sort of hollow, off-axis sound to it, so...)

Meanwhile, I'm not sure *which* thing that we did fixed the problem, but the new work computer is now working, which means that I had better do some of that next week. :) (It may have been a fix to the proxy settings, as that was one of the things that we tried.)

Right now, K is out at the after-party and we are trying to decide how long we will stay up waiting for her to come home. :)

I got a push from a friend of mine and I am now trying to sort out streaming for my music. This is being a learning experience.

Apparently, I managed to set up the remix of "The Grim Roper" for streaming as part of the duplication process. It is now bringing in about $20 a month in streaming royalties, which is not a huge amount of money, but which is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Today, I have succeeded in reclaiming my BMI account. It has 21 or so of my songs registered and they apparently owe me about $20 that should arrive some time next month.

I started setting up "Seven Miles a Second" for streaming, but didn't finish it. I have since finished setting it up and have done the same for "Falling Toward Orion". Next up is "Liftoff to Landing" and then "Live In Germany (mostly...)" which means that I should get the BMI registrations complete for all of the songs of mine on all of those albums.

This is a fascinating little bunch of stuff to sort out...

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 expect to spend a lot of time in the studio this weekend. After we got the trash out tonight, I excused myself to go downstairs and install the new software that I'll be wanting to use. That's happening now, I hope.

And, if not, I'll try again. :)

I was explaining to K the other day how there is something to be said for my basic approach of postponing decisions until it's obvious what the right answer is. Now, given that Microsoft is going to be supporting Windows 10 with no extra pain or expense until October of next year, this means that I could put off putting together a new computer until then.

Of course, I didn't. I was tempted by the sales as Black Friday approached and I jumped in, bought a new set of parts, and put the new computer on Wednesday. And it's coming together nicely so far.

This morning, I woke up to a headline in my Google feed that indicated that Microsoft had decided to officially relax the CPU requirements for running Windows 11. Aargh! *Three* days after I assemble the new computer and I could have sidestepped the whole thing without having to dance the hokey pokey.

This afternoon, I went online to check things out. It turns out that the article was an AI written piece of crap with no actual relationship with fact. Oh.

I will still need to figure out exactly how to deal with the two machines in the household that don't support Windows 11 -- one of which is thirteen years old, the other nine years old and only disqualified by the CPU requirement now that I've installed a TPU 2.0 module on the motherboard. The latter should be easier to deal with. The former is going to need a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM to keep going.

Ah, well. It keeps life entertaining.

I had plans to do some things this afternoon and became sidetracked by working on the new computer. The good news is that the new computer is creeping up on being ready to go. There are probably still a bunch of files on the old computer that need to be copied over, but I'm definitely in the vicinity of done.

Until I find the next thing that I've forgotten to install...

The case for the new computer arrived today instead of the originally anticipated Friday. It's been sitting in Hodgkins since Monday morning, so I can only guess that they got tired of looking at it. :)

Since all of the parts were now here, I decided to start assembling the computer this evening. This is always a new adventure, even when working with parts similar to ones you've used before, but everything is now wired up with the exception of the reset switch and the hard disk light, which is going to require a pair of tweezers to get the connectors in place. Asus motherboards used to come with a "Q-connector", which would allow you to wire these finicky parts to a single connector and then ram the whole assemblage into place, but that is apparently no longer the plan. And a shame it is too.

Tomorrow, I will get the last of those connectors in place, put the sides back on, and then haul it upstairs and connect it to the KVM switch so that I can boot it up and start loading BIOS updates and OS. And then a *lot* of software.

We'll see how this goes.