I finished reading American Gods last night…which is a pain, because now I have nothing to read until payday…I tried to make it last, but that’s just not possible when a book is good, and it was.
I came across an excellent article during the week – How to Mix a Pop Song From Scratch. It was full with all the information I didn’t have. I’ve never really known how to go about the production side of recording – usually I’m mixing as we record, and then once we’ve recorded everything, I have no idea how to make it sound _good_, if I manage it, it’s pure luck.
But now having read that article, I actually feel confident about the process now, and I’ll resist the urge to add any effects, or otherwise modify the sound during the recording stage, and then sit down and do a proper mixing session once we’ve finished.
Having read that article, I now understand the point of the console view in Cakewalk – I could never figure out why you’d want a whole view to just adjust some volumes, it never occured to me that you’d do it as an entirely separate step. I guess that’s because I’ve always done every step myself, it never occured to me that I should separate them logically.
I have yet to put the new information in to practice, but I mean to soon.
I’m getting rather comfortable with Mandrake now – It has really suprised me. The last version I tried was 6, or 7 and I wasn’t very impressed. It was really easy to use without knowing what you were doing, as long as you went down their carefully constructed path, but if you strayed off the path, everything tended to fall apart. And since I _did_ know what I was doing, I didn’t even want to be on their path, so all in all, it wasn’t for me.
But 10 appears to be completely different – it’s shown itself so far to be very stable, consistent and polished. To the point where I’m actually using the Mandrake supplied version of KDE, which for a user that has stayed on the bleeding CVS edge for 7 years is a big change. Though I think part of it is due to my change in attitude when it comes to Linux. When I first started using it, I loved that it was this whole new system that I could find out about, and learn, and also – it was still fairly imature as a desktop operating system. At that time, Fvwm and Afterstep were about it for desktop environments – apart from Enlightenment, which looked impressive, but was fairly useless. So I enjoyed following the progress of various projects, KDE being one, as I knew that I wanted a consistent desktop, not just a window manager – even though I’ve always been the sort of user that uses the window manager as a way of having multiple consoles on the screen at once ;)
So I’d go through this cycle of spending most of each weekend with my PC in the process of updating the operating system – first updating Debian (unstable of course), and then KDE from cvs, and recompiling. And if I was lucky, come Monday, I’d have a functioning system. If not, then I’d get by on Blackbox until I’d fixed the problems.
But since my time away from using Linux regularly, I think I’ve lost patience with the fiddling, recompiling, and trusting to luck that comes with staying on the bleeding edge. These days, I just want to Get Stuff Done, and Mandrake so far has not got in the way. Though I do wish the package management was a little more like Debian’s.
On the topic of Getting Stuff Done, I managed to get myself focused enough to do some work on my CMS / Personal Publishing system yesterday, not a lot of work, and nothing visible yet, but it was satisfying, and I’m confident that I’ll be able to start making large jumps soon.
Yesterday I also discovered how badly I suck at Soul Calibur II, as my 6 year old daughter beat me 3 times in a row, before I managed to scrape my way up to a 5-5 draw. And I only managed that by playing Cassandra a few times. I have no idea what it is about her that I find so easy. I tried Spawn in one game, and managed to make him float around – which was thoroughly useless, in fact in one floating episode, I came diving down only to miss whoever it was that Caitlin was playing, and then get bonked on the head and KOd. bah. And then to rub salt into the wounds, Caitlin played Spawn next, and she managed to make him to all sorts of impressive things that mostly resulting in me having the shit kicked out of me.
Maybe I should practice before Monday..heh
Today I did a little bit more work on the CMS, but mostly I spent the day locating a CD Ripper and encoder that suited my needs, and I settled on MP3c which I’ve used in the past, and has the right combination of configurability, stability, and support for other encoders (in this case flac) for my needs. The only con is that it doesn’t support background encoding, so it rips first and then encodes, but I’m not too fussed about that.
The rest of day involved setting up Subversion on my server, to use instead of CVS. Since I recently discovered that I was under the wrong impression about a couple of things – That it required Apache (it doesn’t), that it doesn’t do atomic commits (it does), and that it doesn’t version directories (it does).
As it was, I set it up with Apache anyway, as I liked the idea of being able to browse the repository via HTTP and WebDAV, and also I should be able to access it from work that way. It was very simple to set up – even with me putting it in a virtual host. Anyone whos’ ever configured Apache would have no problem whatsoever.
The only problem I faced is that the eclipse plugin for it – subclipse, currently doesn’t seem to work. Hopefully there will be a new version soon, as I don’t want to do too much more work without a proper SCM solution.
In other complete randomness – since I started re ripping all my CDs today, and I started from A, I listened to about 5 hours worth of The Alan Parsons Project. It’s been ages since I last listened them, and I had forgotten how much I liked it, and how much of an influence on my musical tastes that one fateful moment when I first heard “Silence and I” had.
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