My main "DAW" that's digital audio workstation as the world now likes to call them, crashed & burned for the last time Friday night. I was nestled in for a night of throw-down mad beats but it was not to be. I've had the computer since the mid 90's (yeah 90's) and did my best to keep it updated and OFFLINE but is now an un bootable paper weight. I know it's crazy talk but believe me... if you want to catch a work eating, show stopping virus just hop online. The good news is a few years back i expanded and moved all project data to a separate hard drive. The expansion drive is an EIDE and holds 150GB but thats about 90% full and named "darkplace"..... Anyway until 2000-ish I was still running windows 98 and only upgraded to XP as a fix to a virus issue, so I completely missed windows NT, windows 2000 and that horrible vista thing (SP2 was added a few years ago) The bottom line is that... the only thing that computer was allowed to do was MAKE MUSIC. That's it. No games, no surfing, no downloading, just music. I named the computer "Andropolis" which if you know me, will need no explanation, because it's my own little world. I've often joked that of all the things to save in a disaster it would be that hard drive as it represents so much of my musical work. Andropolis had a whopping 30GB hard drive and was custom built just for electronic music. Andropolis and I have been through a lot together, we've written about five albums, countless remixes, and created contributions for other artists albums, and there's about 6 albums worth of songs waiting to be released. I actually feel like I'm saying good bye to a friend or loved one. One of the hardest parts about loosing something you have created is rebuilding it, normally I'm more positive when it comes to looking and accessing situations like this but imagine building a house, now think about what you fill it with, tables, chairs, TV, bed...the list goes on. This is what rebuilding has been similar to because not only did I have my main recording/editing program but I also had hundreds (not kidding) ...hundreds of plugins. Plugins allow you to do very specific tasks. Take distortion for example, there are tons of different plugins that handle just distortion, I'll leave out the part where you can make your own custom settings because that could be a posting all it's own. At about midnight I finished rebuilding the new computer, installing software, installing the sound card, and yes reinstalling what plugins I've been able to find. The good news is Prymal studios was about to throw out a computer but donated it to me a few months back. I think its only 3 years old but it didn't fit their needs. They know I am a novice Computer tinkerer enthusiast & grade A maguyver-er. Even though I have a relatively newer, better, faster and more updated computer I still miss Andropolis.
Not sure if you noticed but in the picture above "darkplace" is already installed...over on the right ?
:-)
