What better way to spend one of my days off than troubleshooting network issues?! For some weird reason, I’ve started having difficulties with streaming video, namely YouTube and now Netflix is acting up too. I’d start downloading/streaming a video, it would load about halfway, then just stop playing. I’d have to pause then restart the video, or scrub all the way to the end before going back to the middle of the movie to hopefully have it play through. This happened once before, then the issue magically resolved itself, and it’s now back again.
I’m curious, is anyone else experiencing issues like this? Doesn’t seem to have any bearing whether I’m connected via Ethernet or Wireless, I run both an 802.11b/g and 802.11n networks (separate, actually two different devices entirely), iPhones, iPads, all Macs in the house (hehe I’ve been waiting a long time to say that), but still I’m getting wonky behavior on the network.
I’m in the middle of a fresh backup of 600+ GB of data from my MacBook to my Time Capsule, but once that finishes I might try taking my Airport Extreme out of the equation to see if that resolves the issue.
It seems that tech support, I’m afraid, is always open…
So I can’t say today was completely nonproductive. Before I go any further, if any of my Unique Photo friends read this, I apologize for what I’m about to say…you guy’s didn’t have what I bought at B&H. Anyways, I tried out ordering from B&H Photo in NYC, I wanted a wrist strap for my camera. No problems with the order, so that was certainly good. I decided I wanted a wrist strap for the side of my camera instead of the typical “I’m a tourist” neck strap. After trying to figure out for at least a good half hour how to put the damn thing on, (didn’t come with instructions, but I think it’s one of the indications that Canon has a sense of humor… that, and why they don’t include lens hoods unless you pay for an L series lens…I digress.) I finally got it and it’s pretty nice. Definitely an improvement. I’ll still keep the other one around though, just in case I decide to revert back.
A little “Studio Rebuild” update… I’ve got a 2TB G-Tech G-Raid drive on the way. All of my audio projects and software will get backed up onto that via Time Machine. I’m looking forward to setting that up. It’ll be nice to have that piece of mind knowing that nothing else will get lost should I have any other “surprises” creep up… I find it ironic that when I had the problem at the concert it had to happen during Thriller… Anyway, moving on.
I’ve really got to give my friend Drew mad props. (Drew = My gear guy at Sweetwater, also my “brother from another mother”). The story is a bit convoluted, so I’ll try to sum it up. There’s a software company out there who makes audio plug-ins that are quite widely used throughout the industry. They let their widespread success get to their heads, so they developed this “upgrade” program that would require users to pay exorbitant fees after a year or so from the purchase date, to be protected from the possibility of them releasing new software. So, for example, if someone paid over $3500 in software titles, paying another $600-800 just for the idea of “maybe” getting a new version in another year’s time was not exactly money well spent. Luckily there were many others who agreed with me and voiced complaints. I’d even boycotted them for some time, using other software to get my stuff done. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.
Anyways, back to Drew getting props:
This software company just recently changed their “upgrade” policies (FINALLY!), to a flat-rate system. As it was explained to me, whatever you had, you now pay a much more reasonable flat-rate to have your software updated to the latest version. I’m not going to go into specifics just in case the “flat rate” is different for other people. I’d suggest talking to your pro-audio equipment provider if you have questions (Which should be Drew to begin with, and if it isn’t you need to contact me so I can get you his info!). Being that I’d just upgraded my computer to Snow Leopard, and the latest version of Pro Tools etc, I had practically nothing when it came to audio plug-in software. Thanks to Drew, I’ve got just about all of my plug-ins back and once everything’s installed, I’ll be fully operational once again. Haven’t been there in a while, so a huge thanks to Drew.
Wow, my MacBook’s backup is 445GB. I’m goin’ to bed, I wonder if it’ll be done tomorrow morning. We shall see!
So, as you can see the studio is living and breathing once again! The horsepower has been upgraded to an iMac, 3.06 Ghz Core 2 Duo currently with 3 GB of RAM, but after a visit to crucial.com that will change once I get the upgrade kit to 4GB. I don’t think this one goes to 8gb, I’m going to check though. If it does and the kit isn’t too much I’m going to jump to 8.
The glyph drives are back, did something slightly different than last time. Audio drive is connected via FW800, then the sample/loop/backup audio drive is connected via FW400 to that. The audio interface (currently Digi002r but that may change in the not-too-distant future) is directly connected to the iMac’s FW400 port. I should get no complaints from the software now about FireWire bandwidth issues. If it has a problem, it can suck it. Seriously. I gave it a whole new machine. 
I also moved my Yamaha MG16/4 onto the desk, to make room for the iMac on the side. Unfortunately the iMac won’t fit under the hutch where my monitors are, so I picked up a Samsung 23″ HDTV/monitor from costco, is doing the trick nicely. It’s nice to have a 2 monitor setup… It’s not as elegant as I’d like, but it’s cool just the same.
I’ve still got a lot of work to do still: rewiring heaphone mix stuff, run the snake, wipe the old Macbook Pro and put it on eBay, and continue with the ongoing process of straightening this room up. Once everything is working and all is done, I’d like to start advertising locally and maybe even do some more side work to bring a little extra cash on the side. That’s a long-term goal of course.
Had a nice productive day nonetheless. More updates and pictures to come.
The 320 -> 640 clone appeared to go smoothly. My Macbook is running with the 640GB HD installed, and everything is looking good. I’m currently copying my user folder from the iMac over to this machine, it’s about 250GB of data so it’s probably going to go all night and some time into the morning I’d imagine. Just as a test, I opened up Aperture and all my photos were there, no issues that I could tell, so that’s certainly a plus as well. Keep your fingers crossed, hopefully the tech gods will continue to smile upon my efforts.
Cloning my Macbook’s 320GB hard drive onto the 640GB. Once that’s done, I’m going to grab the user folder off of my iMac and put it on here. Once that’s all set, I’ll wipe the iMac and put Snow Leopard on it, and put it in the studio. Yay waiting.
Well, I just got back to my hotel room, it’s about 12:25am. It’s snowing, my feet are aching, and I’m exhausted. It was a busy night, there were some stressful times, there was some tension, but all in all, the show went on, and for what it was it was nothing short of a complete success….with some exceptions.
To say the concert went off “without a hitch” would be extremely subjective. In the eyes of the audience, the parents, whose kids were up there on stage, it was a great show. Everyone did their jobs, the chorus sounded great, they stayed together, they had fun. From a technical standpoint, it was about as much of a clusterfuck as humanly imaginable, and it’s all thanks to Pro Tools.
Before I go into the specifics, let me just set the scene for how things were setup, which is part of the problem. My “live sound” experience is quite limited, my “live sound and recording” even more so. Put me in a recording studio and I’m right at home. One key detail is the signal path of the audio; where it goes before and after it’s being recorded. The problem we had, was that it was going into the computer, then being spit out to the house speakers and monitors on-stage. Bad idea. (I can hear all of the live sound guys going “Doh! Don’t ever do that!!”) Now I know why.
Anyways, on to what happened…
Towards the end of “Thriller”, right before the “Darkness falls across the land, the midnight hour is at hand…” voiceover thing, I got the spinning beachball of death on the MacBook Pro. The playback track stopped, audio continued to pass but there was no music for the guy to read against so he read the voiceover over silence. Once he was done, lights went to black, and the crowd applauded. So far, not too bad, but with the beachball still spinning and the next song supposed to come up, I had to do something quickly. We called intermission early, and I rebooted the computer, booted very slowly. Forced reboot again, which seemed to be closer to normal speed. Opened the session back up, beachballed again. I made the call to repatch the mics directly into the house PA, and run the 2nd half of the show without recording it. That is what made the show a success, because we took Pro Tools out of the equation, and thus the lesson I learned. Whenever running sound, always patch the audio for the house before the recording medium. That way, the show goes on even if the computer goes down, and the audience is none the wiser. Thank goodness for the backup plan. Without that, we’d have been up the creek without a paddle, and I would have looked like a complete jackass.
Luckily, everyone was very cool about it and by the end of the show had probably forgotten there was even an issue to begin with. I got a lot of pats on the back, and “hey don’t worry about it, shit happens, etc.” from everyone, which certainly helped, but I definitely felt bad.
At this point right now, I think there’s an issue with one of my Glyph drives, or my MBP internal HD (which is actually less than 6 months old, I’d just upgraded it a few months back to a 320GB 7200rpm.) It may just need a reinstall, I’m not sure. I didn’t have any other things running (Airport was off, Bluetooth was off), only had 2 Glyph HD’s (audio drive directly via FW800, then 2nd Audio drive via FW400, then Digi002 connected to that.) The Glyph on FW800 is newer, and that one had some difficulty mounting after the crash. Not sure if that’s the culprit, I need to further troubleshoot the issue to know for sure.
In the car on the way back to my hotel, I was thinking about how to point the finger of blame. I really can’t in this case, at least not yet, because I just don’t know what happened. I think the system may be due for a fresh OS install (Snow Leopard upgrade, newest versions of everything (PT/etc) and whatnot, stress test, maybe some diagnostics see if the hardware’s ok…). Whatever the case, I need to get this resolved ASAP because now that the MJ stuff is done, the band is most important. I need to focus on Faces East. We’ve got an album to do, and I’ve got some antsy bandmates looking to get back in the studio. Understandably so.
I’m pondering wiping the iMac from my bedroom and making it the new studio machine, and picking up a 21.5″ for my day-to-day stuff…. That would make the most sense, and probably be the quickest solution to get me back up and running with minimal downtime. It certainly doesn’t help that as soon as I get back I have to return to work right away. I’d love a day or two to get my studio back up to snuff before bringing the band back in.
Anyways, at the end of the day, the show went on and the kids had fun, and hey that’s what the point of all of this was right? Knowing what happened tonight, how not to have this happen again in the future, I am really excited to see next year’s show, because I know from a technical standpoint it’s going to be that much better.
I have to give a big shout out to Alex, my new friend who was doing lighting tonight – He was amazingly helpful with getting things repatched during intermission. He didn’t have much experience with audio (which was not a big deal at all), but he knew how to follow directions and he was damn good at it.
So keep your fingers crossed for me, and my studio. We’ve got some serious work to do, and some issues to resolve pronto.
Did I mention that I absolutely love western Mass? Could totally see myself moving up here at some point….. when, I have no idea. Just a thought.
Bye for now.
It really is amazing just how much we’ve come to rely on all of our technology. I know, personally, I can’t be without my iPhone, it’s my lifeblood. But in general, we all can’t live without our computers, the internet, etc. My full-time job has me fixing people’s computer problems, and resolving their concerns, and it’s pretty obvious that no matter what I do, vacation or not, I can never escape it. It’s become such a regular part of my day-to-day life, just like breathing and taking a shower. I was having difficulties this morning trying to download the iPhone 3.1.3 software update. So, I went through the motions, updated my router’s firmware, reset my cable modem, thankfully that all seemed to fix the problem, hence my writing this blog while my phone is updating.
Tech support, undoubtedly,is never closed, it’s always open for business, 24/7/365. I’m referring to “tech support” in the conceptual sense, the “act of supporting technology”,not necessarily the actual physical call centers waiting to take your call, and read their pre-scripted responses to your questions, ie “I’m sorry that you are having difficulty with _insert problem here_ . If you would permit me to provide you with amazing customer service, _insert name of customer here_, I would like to see that it is properly resolved quickly” blah blah blah. We’ve all been there. I’m thankful that I don’t provide my service that way. (Ever notice the little “conversational” scripted things they have, which when delivered don’t sound conversational at all? For example, right in the middle of your call the rep could blurt out, “How is the weather? Is it nice? It is nice here.” Yeah, I don’t buy that for a second… but it’s funny anyways.) I digress.
The concept of technical support reminds me of the whole “why aren’t there more non-gasoline-powered cars on the roads these days” thing. Withoiut going off on too much of a tangent, big oil companies don’t want to go out of business because cars wouldn’t need their product anymore, therefore cars are continually manufactured to require gasoline. Is it possible that technology is manufactured to still need support? Ooh. I don’t know.
Building on that, I ask this: How much technical support was around when home-based computers were in their infancy, ie Apple iiC’s, Macintosh Classics, Performa’s, Quadras, IBM 286′s, 386′s, etc. Operating Systems were far simpler and less feature-ridden, so they had less things to break. I remember computers were made so toughly, you could practically throw one down a flight of stairs then turn it on and play your favorite game moments later. Not so much is the case today.
Time to get my day started here, software’s updated, and the wheels of progress appear to still be turning. I’m going to put my cape away and change into my regular clothes, Supergeek is done for now.
The facebook app on the iPhone needs an update, in the worst way! Typically when I’m surfing through the news feed, if I change my phone from portrait to landscape, it resets my position in the list!! So if I’ve read down a number of lines I have to scroll all the way back down and keep hitting “More” etc, and load them, etc. So annoying! Anyone else having this problem??
