Posts from — October 2008

I was at my college homecoming game this weekend (I was asked to present to the computer science students there, and even though it was only 17 years since I graduated, I decide to attend homecoming with the wife and kid).  Not sure if we won the homecoming game or not, but as we were driving down to Dallas to see some family I did listen to the first half of the UT / OSU game, and got to watch the second half.  Man, both teams played very well.  

But alas, Pokes, the Longhorns won.   You put up a good fight. 

Is it significant that I didn’t know the final score of my alma mater’s homecoming game?  I’ll let you decide – we’re the Fighting ROOS.  Yes, the Ausin College Kangaroos.

Gulp.

This weekend my wife and I met up with ten of our friends in Kansas City to ultimately go see #17 ranked OSU play #3 ranked Missouri.  We were all hopeful for an upset, but knew it would be tough.

This pretty much sums it up:

Despite one of the worst (possible) calls I’ve ever seen – OSU going for it on their own 20 with a 4th and 18 by way of fake punt – missing by two yards, we had a great time made all the merrier (we are from Texas after all) by the fact that Texas beat #1 OU while we were driving to the game – to take over the #1 ranking no less!

The boys:

Kirk, Jeff, Dave, Joe (me), Tim and Matt

The ladies:

Teri, Jenn, Sean, Mel, Brooke, Heather and Elizabeth (my wife)

 There were several great things about the trip, besides all the great football, comraderie, and getting to see old friends:

1. To my knowledge, we kept our adult dignity intact, and no one puked
2. Jen and Tim Miller, our hosts, put on one HELLUVA tailgating party and the BBQ the next day was world class (too bad the Dallas Cowboys lost, but heck, ribs are ribs!)
3. Somehow or another, we ended up with ROCKSTAR parking – the likes of which I’ve only ever seen when travelling with Kirk Reynolds – we accidentally made it into the major donor lot at the Missouri stadium and for some reason were allowed to stay – hence the tiger in all the pictures!

It was a blast seeing everyone and special thanks to Jen and Tim for hosting us in their lovely house in Kansas City!  We gotta do this again sometime soon.

Ok, so the new hard drives arrived.  Two gloriously bubble wrapped 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM drives from NewEgg.com.  Now, I have heard some complaints about their shipping, and about these drives – so I upgraded to FedEx shipping and both my drives seem to working flawlessly.  Installing a new hard drive in a MacBook pro is perhaps the easiest drive install I’ve ever done.  Just four screws for the caddy, and the rest was without tools and painless.

I have decided (since I already did a Logic install) that I will leave the “vanilla” logic install, including Jam Packs and all that jazz, on the 320Gb system drive.  After all it’s on the same SATA controller as the other drives anyway.  Henceforth, however, all samples, content, instruments, etc. will go on the Media Library drive – the new Barracuda.

All my project data goes on the other Barracuda.

It’s taking about three hours to copy over my 200gb+ of samples and instruments, but I am sure this is primarily because of the speed of the USB 2.0 external drive I am copying from.

Oh, as an aside, my MacMini is now my “main” computer – dunno what I am going to do with all those PCs I’ve accumulated.  I went ahead and purchased the elgato Turbo.264 and have to say that I LOVE it.  Whereas before if I was encoding a DVD to AppleTV, I could basically do nothing on my mini, now I can read email, even watch another video, while encoding.  And the quality is great.  I highly recommend this product.

More to come when the memory arrives, I load up a lot of instruments, and we try this rig out.

Well, I just ruined my Christmas and birthday for the next two years!  I had to agree that I wouldn’t buy another computer until after 2010 to get it, but I finally broke down and bought a new MacPro – and holy cow does it rock!

I bought the base  (if you can call an eight Xeon system base) entry-level 8-way MacPro – upgrading to better CPUs, etc. just didnt’ seem worth the expense.

However, I went ahead and purchased a few extras to configure this machine as a truly “one stop shop” for all my music production needs – I’ll discuss my final configuration in a bit.

Out of the box, this thing looks and performs awesome!  I did a couple of tests with it, one a DVD to H264 conversion, the other a Logic project performance test.  Both were somewhat subjective, but here’s what I found:

• The DVD conversion process was about 10x faster than on my MacBook (my MacBook is a Core Duo, not Core 2 – but 10x is pretty amazing) – took about 12 minutes!
• The music test was much more subjective – however, anyone that’s done any Logic’ing on an older MacBook probably gets this.  On my MacBook, I had a 24 track project with a few plug-ins, using an Apogee Duet, A Powercore Firewire, and a Focusrite LiquidMix.  Sometimes, starting up a project I would get system overload errors, disk speed errors, etc. and couldn’t get it to play.  Usually, playing it over and over it would eventually cache (I think) enough info that I could mix the session.  With the MacPro?  Let’s just say that even running most of my audio data off a USB2.0 drive (leaving the Firewire bus for audio I/O and the Powercore and LiquidMix), I was able to launch my test project flawlessly, it never burped at all and the CPU monitors (yes, all EIGHT of them) didn’t even register that anything was going on!

My current config is that I have a 320Gb OS drive, and all my music files are stored on two external USB2.0 drives – one for my project files, and one for audio files and virtual instruments.  I found that even on the MacPro, it’s better not to do disk I/O on the same bus as audio I/O – I always seem to get noise of some kind at some point.  Separating out the disk I/O from the audio I/O and plug-in processing seems to fix any problems.  I am runnin 2Gb of memory.

However, here’s how it will look soon:

• - (8) 2.8Ghz Xeon CPU
• 10Gb memory
• 320Gb system / OS drive
• 1.5TB project drive
• 1.5TB virtual instrument / sample drive

The drives are all 3GB/s SATA drives hosted right in the computer – NewEgg had a screaming deal on 1.5TB Seagates ($189!) that I couldn’t pass up.  Now, I won’t need to use ANY USB2.0 while doing music production.  I will use my existing external drives as backup drives for the internal drives – so nothing’s wasted.  I don’t need RAID – it’s probably overkill – but at some point if I needed even more performance I would trick it out with a SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) option – but I doubt I will need to.  This still leaves me with an empty internal bay as well.

Can’t wait to get it all configured this way, I expect I will be able to run virtually unlimited tracks / plug-ins, etc.  Plus, if I run out of CPU room, I can always use my MacBook as a LogicNode!