Last night, I mastered some karaoke mixes of my Eponymous 4 demos, and I created some MP3s out of the mixes.
I’m usually a stickler about my MP3 tagging, but the tools I use for my demos don’t really deal with tagging. I don’t use the MP3 export function in Cakewalk because I trust LAME far too much, so I use winLAME to convert my demo WAV files to MP3. The version of winLAME I have doesn’t include an interface to tag.
An update from the previous entry …
I found a USB2.0 PCI card at Fry’s for $18, $2 shy of the minimum budgeted amount. It looks like its works because Acronis True Image told me it would take only 2 hours to compress the main partition of my old computer, rather than the 7 hours it took using the USB1.1 ports.
Unfortunately, the 80GB partition of that same drive with 65GB worth of MP3s required 6 hours of processing time. At first, it predicted a compression size of 30GB. Little did Acronis True Image know that MP3s don’t compress very well. I only ended up with about 2GB of savings.
It’s been 19 months since I bought a new computer and 19 months since I paid my old computer any mind.
I use it now as a web server, and I do all development work on it.
It’s eight years old and creaky. Here’s a feature comparrison between it and my newer machine.
I really hated this past week. I knew technology would be my bane the moment the ATM ate my card, and I’ve run on little sleep every night. But it wasn’t all bad. Some of it was quite nice.
Monday: During class, my instructor offers up a really good Michael Caine quote: "You may hate the movie, but you’ll love the house I bought it with." My instructor is co-writing with a hitmaking songwriter on a project, and they’re doing something geared for radio. When some of my classmates teased him for selling out, his response was, "Eat me."
Tuesday: I stop by Waterloo to compare prices on the Battlestar Galactica Season 2.5 DVD set. At first, I decide to get it from Best Buy when I bought my new hard drive, but then I got to talking with the classical expert about Shostakovich’s string quartets. I end up getting the Fitzwilliam Quartet cycle, and I figure since I’m spending that much, I’ll just throw in Battlestar Galactica with it. Season 3 starts Oct. 6!
Wednesday: I go to the Blogger meet-up, my first in a long time.
Thursday: I worry about my performance review at work because I blew off this research project I was supposed to be doing, but as it turned out, the head of the department has cooled off on the project itself. So I dodge that bullet. Aside from that, everyone loves me.
Friday: I discover Acronis True Image.
If I hadn’t done a Google search for "windows boot external hard drive", I wouldn’t have come across this article which mentioned Acronis True Image.
I’m not a complete stranger to the concept of drive images — my department at work uses them all the time — but it wasn’t until I faced my own backup needs did I need to create an image of my drive.
Monday: ATM in my office eats my card. I cancel it but now must way for a new one to arrive in the mail.
Tuesday: One of my trashy neighbors decides it would be fun to start screaming into a karaoke machine with the echo on full at 4 a.m. Sleep-deprived, I show up to work and call the apartment office to find out how to get that motherfucker evicted.
Wednesday: An upgrade to a new internal drive goes horribly bad because I have only one SATA port with which to do a data transfer. It would have been easier if I could have set up a master and slave, but SATA doesn’t support that.
Thursday: My TiVo stops responding to the remote control, thereby forcing a reboot. Purchase of a hard drive enclosure still can’t address the data transfer, so I spend the entire night reinstalling Windows and all my applications. I wonder whether it’s a Mercury retrograde. (It’s not.)
Friday: I don’t know yet. The day has just begun. My mind tends to go to very dark places.
That’s not l33t. "L10N" is a common abbreviation for "localization", and I figure I may as well abbreviate "blogging" to "B6G" — you know, just to be a smart ass.
I’m less impressed by the idea of a CEO blogging than by the fact his blog is translated into several languages.
Wow. That’s a great idea.
That would be great for Musicwhore.org. At the very least, Japanese readers should experience my total lack of Japanese comprehension in their own language!
An ATM in my office ate my card this morning. Literally.
It had its usually welcoming greeting, "Insert card". When I did, I got an angry red screen that told me the machine was out of service. I hit cancel, thinking the ATM would spit my card back out. But it didn’t.
I went to the receptionist, but she couldn’t really help me all that much. I called my bank to cancel the card. I still need to get cash.
Wow. Today is really going to suck.
It’s nice to see HawaiiUP up (haha!) and running again, especially after having been overshadowed by the phenomenally successful Lost podcast, The Transmission. Even Dreama has jumped on the podcasting bandwagon.
I toyed with podcasting back in March, but I never launched it. I was still unfamiliar with my microphone, and the shows I did produce sounded wildly inconsistent. It also sucks living next to loud trashy neighbors and a bus route.
I’ve since had more practice with my microphone — and just as importantly, setting up my "sound booth" — and I’m thinking about revisiting the podcast. Out of curiosity, I thumbed through some books about podcasting at the bookstore and tried to find how much space the authors dedicate to practical speaking tips. The results were just as bemusing as when I first explored the topic back in March.
I’ve seen numerous blog entries and articles about how to survive the ACL Music Festival. Here’s my advice: don’t go.
I worked at the very first festival, and it scarred me for life. My perception of the festival is perhaps colored by the fact that in the three years I’ve gone, I was never there to have fun. I was there to make sure drunken assholes and juvenile delinquints didn’t take five-finger discounts.