We haven’t done a proper postmortum on the Leannan Sidhe album project yet, partly because of time, and partly because it’s not through mastering. We’re pretty much done, though; principal recording is over, and Alec has done all or nearly all the mixing; I just ran a set of 50 pre-mastered discs for Shanti this weekend, to take to Arkansas for a festival.

Despite that, I have made a few notes and workflow changes. For one thing, I’ve always known regions – which are windows onto recorded tracks, like snippets of tape, but adjustable – had names, could be renamed, and those names were somehow inherited. But it’s only now I’ve actually started using that, naming them by take numbers and such. It’s made compiling composite takes much less confusing.

But hang on, this is a DIY post, promise

But we did have one problem that cost us seven or eight takes during the process.

We do all the recording in isolation headphones. The performer hears the playback in them, as well as what they’re doing, and none of that gets into the mics. Every so often we stop and listen to what we’ve done on the studio playback speakers. (The “monitors.”) Then we’ll go back to recording.

And all this works great… unless, of course, you forget to turn the monitors off, which we did. Several times. In isolation headphones, we can’t hear the speakers, so we don’t necessarily catch it.

Meanwhile, speaker selection has been a little weird – the amp has “A” and “B” buttons, and “B” went to a three-way box, because I had four total speaker sets. And there aren’t any indicator lights.

Or, rather, there weren’t any indicator lights.

My first idea was “can I make something that’ll flash when there’s speaker activity?” I wasn’t planning on changing the speaker setup or any of that; I just wanted to piggyback onto what I already had. I came up with a simple solution – literally just a resistor and a diode, pulling off 0.8% of the output circuit to cause lights to flicker at loud volumes. It’s not everything I’d like but it’s as close as I’m getting at the moment.

Separately, I’d decided I didn’t like the “amplifier on” light I’d jury-rigged up before, with those little green rectangle nightlights on an extension cord, and figured I could put both of those into one box with like four cords running to it. Seemed a bit excessive, but worth doing anyway.

So I went looking for an experimenter’s box to hold all that. I wasn’t really finding a good-sized one, when I stumbled across an old Radio Shack audio-video selector box.

I found a picture of the same model, elsewhere online:

Switches audio left, audio right, and composite video

The left side of the box is just blank space. The box is that wide only so there’s enough room on back for all the plugs. While I couldn’t find a “before” picture of the insides online to show you, there’s just not a whole lot inside, either; it’s four switches on a single circuit board.

And that’s when I decided I could change the speaker setup so all four speakers went through one box. No more A/B and external switcher: one box. And that box could have a couple of indicator lights on it for signal. Perfect!

Except this is one of those projects that turned into kind of a science-related mimetic disorder episode. I had an idea, I came up with a circuit, I figured out I could make a way simpler version… then I fiddled with that and improved it again… then I realised I could add another bit of functionality over here… then I realised I could add another piece of functionality… until I ran out of parts. Then I got more parts and realised I could add something else… and I didn’t take any pictures for quite a while. But I have a couple.

In this photo, I’ve already done some work; those resistor pairs are replacements for lower-watt resistors of the same value. I didn’t really need to do that; they’re just buffers to prevent capacitance buildup in disconnected pins, and are out of the signal path.

It’s right about here that I really realised this wasn’t an audio switch, it was an audio-video switch. And I wasn’t using the video. And if I could isolate the video portion of the box… I could run a few volts of power indicator on those connections.

Which can also mean lines for speaker select indicators, because these switches are switching both audio and video circuits….

And that’s how these cascades get started. Follow along, eh?

Now, before you try to do this, it’s really, really important that you know you’ve isolated all parts of the video circuit from everything else. Including the ground line. Even if you’re only running three volts of DC on it, the speaker signal is AC, and speaker circuitry does not like DC. You can and will damage your speakers. I had to scrape away part of the circuit board to isolate the ground half of the video circuit; you probably will too!

Now by the time I’d started taking pictures, I’d already done a fair bit of work. Here’s the faceplate, with holes drilled for power, left signal, right signal, and speaker selection lights:

I thought I was done here, but that was a lie; I was just out of parts.

Here’s the faceplate, back on the board, with most of the LED lamps mounted. (See again: out of parts.) Here, I’ve also isolated the video circuit from all the others, while still leaving it connected to the switches. That resistor on the lower right is attached to what had been the video ground, and it’s the buffer resistor for the LED power circuit:

Now, with my multimetre, I’d figured out that the lower two posts on the left side (as seen in these photos) were the posts for completing the video circuit on each switch. Now they’re power switches, so let’s start connecting them to the LEDs!

Now here, I’ve built a return rail. Each switch is connected to an LED input, then all the LED outputs are connected together on that rail, and the rail connects back to the ballast resistor. If you’ve seen this circuit before done in isolated wires like this before, well, welcome to vacuum tube amplifier construction, circa 1956.

You might notice that we don’t have the power light attached, yet – because, again, out of parts.

Next up was to put in my tiny signal detectors. It’s nothing more than a high-value resistor and an LED. Remember: LEDs are diodes. You don’t need two separate parts (diode and lamp) if you have enough ballast to let the LED itself do the diode job:

The ballast resistor and LED are connected in series, picking off the signal line from the inputs, and going back to the grounds. I wired left and right grounds in parallel here… really just for symmetry’s sake. They’re the same ground. But as long as the signal side of the diode is isolated, you won’t get any signal intermix.

Note that I’m picking up the audio signal from the switches, like with the DC power. This is just for ease of access – there wasn’t a good place to pick up the signal anywhere else. Those were the input pins for each channel, so always on.

Now, overnight, that LED pickup bothered me. I couldn’t complete the box without the extra parts – this is when I was tweeting WHY ISN’T THERE A 24-HOUR RADIO SHACK IN THIS TOWN? SCIENCE DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR NEED FOR SLEEP! – so the design was still foreground in my brain. And while it isn’t a big signal hit, every time that LED lights up, I’m picking off a little bit of output signal.

So I decided that I needed to add a “defeat” switch, to be able to have those LEDs out of the loop for ordinary listening.

I did that by taking the two returns from the signal-detect LEDs – the leads heading towards ground – and running them through an on/off switch. Easy-peasy. The most difficult part was a switch that would fit – I wanted to use a rocker switch I have several of, but it simply wouldn’t physically fit on the faceplate. Instead, I went with a push on/push off.

As soon as that ground is lifted, the circuit is isolated, and we’re all done.

To be honest, I don’t really hear any difference one way or the other, but I still feel better about having included it. ^_^

And, separately, I ran leads for the power indicator light. The way I wired it, it dims when a speaker is enabled. That was an accident, but I like it.

Finally – this piece of Radio Shack kit was built for line level signals, not speaker level signals, and I wanted more metal on the rails for the thicker signal. I’ve already been using a piece of kit a lot like this, but it bothered me more here. I ran that on the opposite side instead:

I was a little nervous about having the parallel rails – a tiny one on the top of the circuit board, a proper one underneath – but I did the time math and the difference is going to be inaudible to anyone. We’re talking less than microseconds.

So here’s what it all looks like before being put back in the case, with no power:

And here it is all connected up. One video connector is used for +3V input. The other video connects are filled with hot glue, to make sure nothing ever accidentally gets plugged in there. The left amber light is amp-has-power. The two red LEDs (which are brighter and less red in this photo than in real life) indicate strong speaker signal. The green LEDs indicate which speaker is selected. It is possible to have none selected, which is nice:

So. The old speaker-selector box is pulled; this replaces it. The old blue-rectangle amp-is-on power indicator is gone; this replaces that, too. The “A” and “B” switches on the amp can mostly be ignored. There are now lights to indicate which speakers are on, and there are loud-signal lamps which flicker as an additional layer of warning.

Hopefully, now, we’ll finally not have to worry quite so much about accidentally leaving the monitors on.

This post is part of The DIY Studio Buildout Series, on building out a home recording studio.

You know how all those white plastic electronics – computers, game systems, lamps, just whatever – start to turn yellow after a few years? And no amount of cleaning will fix it, not even bleach, which tends to just hurt the plastic a bit?

A few years ago, some antique computer collectors – particularly of old Amiga, Commodore, and Atari white plastic computers – did a lot of experimenting around and came up with a solution. It’s known generically as Retr0brite, but you can make it yourself. Essentially it’s a kind of oxidation – a bromine solution is added to the plastic as a fire-retardant, and over time a hydrogen atom gets replaced by an oxygen, which rotates the molecule just a bit to expose the bromine, which looks like this:

UV light makes it worse more quickly

All this means that eventually the 1990s-era trackball that used to live in the sunroom looks like this:

Yep. That’s yellowed.

This is an old Microsoft Intellipoint trackball from the 1990s. I have four of them, one still new in box. It is, for my hands, the single best pointing device ever made. Needing to take it apart to scrub it out inside got this whole thing started.

As you can see, it’s got quite yellow over time, thanks to that UV-triggered bromine exposure. Retr0brite triggers the release of the aforementioned hydrogen, and re-replaces it with oxygen, reconfiguring the molecule just that little bit. You’re actually restoring the plastic with this process, rather than damaging it further.

Mixing up Retr0brite is actually quite simple. The only difficult part is getting the right mixture of artificial mucus, to use as a physical stabiliser. You need one, to keep the Retr0brite on the plastic, rather than running off into the tray.

Minion Paul had to leave the room

It’s just corn starch, relax. XD

I was able to get a reasonably-pure 12% hydrogen peroxide solution locally, but if I had the option, I’d go up to 15% or even 20% – just because by the time you get the artificial mucus into the mix, you’ve diluted the peroxide/TAED mixture further, and unless you have more UV than we have around here, that’ll slow down the reaction quite a bit. More is not always better – in California, this might’ve been too strong a mix.

But! After a day mostly in sunlight – result!

Not all the way back, but close

A stronger mix or a second day of sun probably would’ve finished the job. That’s against 92-brightness white paper, which actually means slightly blue; Against the brown workstation table, it’s almost shockingly white. But you can still see a difference between inside and outside of case, and I think they should be the same.

So: yay! It works! If you do this, USE EYE GUARDS, SERIOUSLY: once you add the TAED, it can get a bit fizzy, and you do not need this shit in your eyes. I can’t stress that enough. But otherwise, it’s pretty safe.

Here’s another before/after shot – sorry the second one is fuzzy, I didn’t realise until I’d put the trackball back together:

Oh, otherwise, the plastic feels unaffected. If anything, it feels a little smoother, but I think that’s just placebo effect. And if you can’t deal with the mucus, another solution is to throw out the gel entirely and make enough primary solution to submerge the plastic. The only problem there is that the plastic will float, so you’ll need to weigh it down.

So yeah, a fairly easy and effective DIY restoration project. Break out your Commodore 128s, kids, it’s time to make some old-school look brand new. 😀

I didn’t really plan to go offline most of this week – it just kind of worked out that way. Nothing’s wrong, really – the biggest news is that we wrapped up recording on Leannan Sidhe’s Mine to Love a couple of days ago, and the mad scramble down at Alec’s to get the last few changes merged in to the mix is underway!

The funny part about doing a lot of this via Dropbox is seeing all these files change. Every time something big happens I get a flurry of file updates, and I’m all HI I SEE YOU WORKING. XD

Also, I’m doing some duplication work today. MAKIN’ MONEY MAKIN’ CDs, which actually means I did fix my robot and the fixes … appear to be stable! It ran okay overnight, anyway, and I have a nice stack of lightscribed CDs waiting for the master disc, with more printing.

So, yeah! HI, I’M BACK. MISS ME?

Seriously, the last few weeks? Digital audio workstation. Webserver. External storage drive. Backup server. (Well, that’s replaced, not fixed; the old one worked, just really slowly.) CD-burning robot.

This week? I have the replacement transformer for my field-modded-by-somebody SM58 microphone. That should be easy to fix, and then it won’t buzz in the presence of phantom power anymore. Damn, that was annoying.

But mostly, I’m doing a lot of cello recording – final work on Leannan Sidhe’s Mine to Love. And Betsy’s cello, Godiva, gets pretty fierce? And lo, securements come off and my studio reference monitors say WELCOME TO BUZZTOWN!

Yes, Betsy’s cello broke my speakers and made me upgrade them. SONIC ATTACK GRAR!

But that’s fixed now. At least, as fixed as I can make it. These little x77s – if you can even call them that anymore, I’ve modded them so much they’re less than half original – can only take so much bass no matter how much fiddling you do. Right now the biggest source of buzz is at very high volume and from inside the sealed tweeter assembly. I can’t fix it, I’d have to replace it, and ribbon tweeters are kinda spendy.

To wit: maybe I shouldn’t turn them up quite that loud. But it’s tempting, because it’s kind of cool being able to shake the floor with 20cm high bookshelf speakers.

AND NOT BY DROPPING THEM jesus you toons. C’mon.

Anyway, back to music mines. But first! Anna’s new book, Valor of the Healer, is out! She’s got a post up on the official Carina Press site, talking about strong female characters that aren’t physical badasses, and wants to hear about your favorite strong female characters who are strong without the physicality part, because that’s kind of her lead character in this trilogy – strong, despite physical weakness.

Eleanor from The Lion in Winter comes to mind, for me, and if you haven’t seen The Lion in Winter yet, go watch it right the fuck now, seriously.

Anyway, clickie and read and comment. And tell your friends – Anna’s new book is out! 😀

eta: Did I mention there’s a book giveaway involved? No? Damn. Well, there is. Clickie!

ddrescue has completed! I’m about to let this image to a new drive to recover the non-system files which were unreadable. But I do want to compare-and-contrast something. Here’s ddrescue’s completion output. Note in this list:

• 5.49 gigs of errors (recovered, tho’ it took four days of processing
• 21261 read errors.

About to copy 320072 MBytes from /dev/sdb to /home/kahvi/Archives/clearbrook-image.img
    Starting positions: infile = 0 B,  outfile = 0 B
    Copy block size: 128 sectors
Sector size: 512  bytes
Max retries: 0
Direct: yes    Sparse: no    Split: yes    Truncate: no

Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
Initial status (read from logfile)
rescued:   314584 MB,  errsize:   5488 MB,  errors:   21261
Current status
rescued:   314584 MB,  errsize:   5488 MB,  current rate:        0 B/s
   ipos:         0 B,   errors:   21261,    average rate:        0 B/s
   opos:         0 B,     time from last successful read:       0 s
Finished

Yikes! Clearly the drive is on its last legs! What does Hitachi’s SMART firmware think?

smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [i686-linux-3.2.0-39-generic-pae] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

oh.

THANKS GYES.

A heads up: today’s Tech Woot looks to be a quality microphone for the price. I didn’t even know Blue – who are a quality maker – made a USB microphone, or, for that matter, much in this price range. (I think they had a cheap ribbon mic at some point? But mostly their ribbons are pretty high end. And this is a large-can condenser, anyway.)

I wouldn’t want to move it around a lot – it’ll be too fragile to take out – but anyone wanting to muck around with home recording for as little cost as possible, just wanting to learn the concepts? You could do a lot worse. Particularly given that it’s a USB mic, and you won’t need to buy an external interface.

Here’s the URL: http://tech.woot.com/offers/yeti-usb-microphone-12

And, for the record, I have no connection or financial interest in either Woot or Blue, other than losing in a bidding war for a Blue Woodpecker ribbon mic once on eBay. XD

(h/t Stickmaker for the callout.)

We’re down to the last bits of reset/upgrade/recovery on all the systems; I’m finally monkeying with the Hitachi hard drive that started throwing read errors in my laptop.

SMART status check reports zero (0) read failures on this Hitachi drive ever. That’s what the drive’s firmware thinks.

The gddrescue disk recovery tool is down to reading 4144 bytes per second a it tries to chew through all the read errors on this first pass; it hasn’t successfully read a whole 512-byte disk block in 1.1 hours.

I think we’ve found our “SMART got ruined by marketing departments” champion.

eta: The Procession of the Dead:

It’s my birthday! At least, my legal one. There’s another date which is candidate for Actual Birthdate, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

And I’m spending it moving boxes and files and hard drives. YAY. I can’t entirely believe I’m still moving files around from the techsplosion and Ubuntu upgrade farce, but I am. No, no additional hard drives have failed, we seem to be past that for the moment. But new drives mean larger drives mean the old backup drives aren’t big enough anymore means moving things around means playing Towers of Hammurabi with archives.

And y’know, moving a few hundred gigs at a time over USB2? That’s… not the fastest thing ever.

Home stretch, tho’. Home stretch. I should set up a Hall of Remembrance for all the dead drives. The Lord of All Drives could preside over it.

17 Years Good Service

Seriously, that’s the weird little what-is-this-doing-here 2G hard drive from lodestone that was serving as lodestone’s swap. I looked it up. It’s seventeen years old. And in fine working order! I figure that makes it RULER OF ALL HARD DRIVES, because damn.

And on a not-entirely-dissimilar note, what do I do with 160 and 40 gig EIDE hard drives in good working order, anyway? The small one is really slow, to be honest – it’s a total dog – so it kind of sucks and I’m not unwilling to drill it, but the 160g is reasonably fast and low milage and everything! What do you do with stuff like that?

I also have three dead drives, and one 500G EDIE drive that got yanked but which I’m putting into a housing and back into service in a new capacity. (Archives.) That’s six hard drives I’ve had to pull out of machines to get this all back together.

“Digital is forever,” they say. “Once it’s online, it’s eternal.” What a load of crap. Reality? Everything is super fragile and needs constant maintenance.

Even if you’re not a supervillain.

On the Clipper ferry heading to Victoria! I’m not as fond of the Clipper as the other ferries; it’s not bad but it… it’s kind of airplanish. Not as bad as an airplane, not at all, but there’s no lounge or anything like the train or the peninsula ferries.

My head cold seems to be letting up, so I might do an open mic at Cornerstone Cafe, but no promises. I haven’t played since Monday, between replacing hard drive – we’re up to five, honestly, what is this – and this cold, and the post-convention cleanup.

Oh, and I managed to get Ubuntu to reinstall the 3.2.0 kernel, and this time it worked! So I’ll be putting that through its paces as soon as I get home, but in initial teating, we look pretty good. Most importantly, my weird hardware is still working. The funny part is that the more modern version of Jack sees, complains about, and reports the device enumating things wrong – the problem which crashed the 2.x kernels (!) which prompted the 3.1.5 install to begin with.

All of which means basically nothing to anyone! Except that it means things should work better in general in production. And I can use other plugins I couldn’t use before, which is awesome. I’ll be downloading those on Monday. 😀

Anyway, have a good weekend, everybody! Anybody going to be at the Le Vent du Nord show tomorrow?

I’ve been taking advantage of this little schedule break after Norwescon to try to upgrade my DAW from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, because support for 10.04 LTS is going away this month, and also because there are a lot of fixes I need in later versions of Jack and Ardour, and Jack setup and building is so strange that even the author group says DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

I SAID NO SILVER M&Ms IN THE MIX!

It has been an insane nightmare. Had I not been working against a new hard drive onto which I had cloned my old setup, I would’ve been brutally screwed. Did you know 12.04 just bricks some machines – like, send-it-back-to-manufacturer brick them – at startup? Did you know 12.04 upgrade can and will render your machine unbootable? (That happened to me through the GUI; I had to re-image the drive. Also? The install disc for 12.04? I never even get to the first setup dialogue. Hangs.) Did you know that if you try to do a stepwise upgrade as per the instructions here that the tool you use to do it is hardcoded to look in the wrong place for the upgrade files, and that this bug is known and supposedly fixed but still happens to me?

Shall I go on? Because I can. This is why I smashed an Ubuntu install CD yesterday out of frustration and rage. (See above.)

Anyway, I eventually got the server upgrade path to work – it was literally the last route available, but it got me there, mostly. After putting my machine in a state which would leave it unbootable, it had the decency not to force a reboot, and after a few hours, I fixed it. This is also a known bug. If you upgrade in the GUI, you’re just pooched. As I was, except I was working off a new image, my original drives untouched, so I could start over.

Even with all of the above, I’d currently be dead in the water again(!), except the 3.1.5 kernel I installed myself to work around a combination of kernel bug and ill-behaved USB external sound hardware which enumerates its own hardware incorrectly(!) is booting fine, and running fine, under 12.04. So I’m actually up and running! As of around 2am this morning.

However, the kernel the installer wants to install is 3.2.0-39, and it panics at startup. That’s a later version, and I’m worried that this might bite me in the ass somewhere.

Will it? Anybody know? Will 12.04 be stable under a 3.1.5 kernel?

3.2.0-39 doesn’t even get loaded. Here, see if you have any ideas:

Starting up...
[0.929456] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0)
[0.929507] Pid: 1, comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 3.2.0-39-generic #62-Ubuntu
[0.929552] Call Trace:
[0.929594] [<c1561988>] fukkit I'm not typing all this in. printk, panic, mount_block_root, ? sys_mknod, mount_root, prepare_namespace, ?sys_access, kernel_init, ? start_kernel, kernel_thread_helper.

The 3.1.5 kernel (same drive, same directory, same install, etc) launches fine.

So even if I get this working completely, I’ll be looking at a new distribution next time. This is obscene. The fact that pretty much everything I ran into – once I got the drive cloned, where I hit other problems, such as grub insisting that I had no hard drives after booting from one of them and mounting three – is known, and that the core dev team is basically okay with that tells me I’m kind of done with Ubuntu.

Mageia has been recommended highly. So has Mint, but I was later told Mint is just Ubuntu with a different GUI.

Got anything to declare?

Yeah. Don’t install Ubuntu.