Today has been one of those days. Now, I'd like to say that I did allow the day to develop, I just don't say, "It's going to be one of those days...", early in the morning 'cos I spilt the coffee. No, don't curse the day!
One of my jobs at Central Hall is to get the talk recorded and get it to the office on Monday; normally this is quite a straightforward task. Well, as straightforward as anything "technical" ever is! I'm also recording a new song and it (was) nearly done. I was given a PC for recording purposes and I prepare the talks on that machine too.
So I import the talk WAV from the H2 (takes ages...) to my Tracktion software as usual and it plays. Once. Then it's silent. I can even see the waveform on the screen but it's making no sound. My song tracks all work fine - on the same screen, on the same software. So I re-import the WAV and again it works once and then goes on strike. OK, restart the PC and begin again with a Normalised (takes absolutely ages on the H2) WAV now and it seems to be better. I chop the track nicely and go for an Export as a WAV as normal. At this point the whole Tracktion screen simply disappears. Uh, this is bad...didn't save the song...hours of work...gone in an instant.
This process of arriving at a point significantly worse off than where I started has taken me until lunchtime.
After huffing and puffing for a bit I resign myself to having to re-record the song (acoustic, bass, vocal, keys, drums...) from scratch and re-do the talk. Humph.
OK, re-restart the PC and...TRACKTION HAS COMPLETELY DISAPPEARED FROM THE COMPUTER AAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!! Now, I can't even re-record the song! Or redo the talk!
So, at the end of this day I have spent quite a lot of energy getting myself to a point some distance behind where I was when I started.
2 comments:
Ah my sympathies. The advantage of being a computer professional: you spend all day every day using flaky packages like this (mainly created by microsoft). This sort of thing happens to you on an annual basis. After about five or six years of this you finally get it into your head that saving regularly is essential. Well anybody can work that out, but here is the not-many-people-know-this-expert-tip:
It took me years to figure this out.
When you've lost a load of data and you start that I-must-save-often thing... you must keep doing it.
Your human instinct is to stop doing the regular saves until next time you lose a ton of data.
I think they should teach "saving" at school. Though maybe they could keep the "you must keep doing it" lesson until A-Levels.
Thanks for having us all round at the weekend - hope you enjoy the spare pork pie - don't let it go out of date =)
Love
Rob
This reminds me of that song by d:ream... (sings,in wailing voice): "Thiiiiiings can only get betterrrrrrr!" ;)
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