Hm. That’s … not a half-bad album title, is it? File that one away… （⌒▽⌒）

Anyway, as you might tell from the last post, I’ve been doing a fair bit of studio maintenance lately, getting rid of redundant/obsolete cabling, finally making second-tier stuff that wasn’t working actually work, all that. And a very small part of that work has been fixing an issue I noticed when I started using the new sound-engineer position that I made viable a few months ago.

It’s not complicated: the studio computer monitors are on a post, mounted to the edge of the desk. It’s been fine. But when the monitors are rotated to face the new engineering location, it tilts a bit, and I’ve been thinking maybe it was tilting more lately. The edge of the desk is sturdy and there’s no damage that I can tell, but there is a gap between the overhang the clamp attaches to and the side of the desk, and what’s happening is that it’s flexing, and over time, it will break.

So the obvious solution is to get some wood to fill the gap. Then the edge won’t be able to flex, and the monitor post will stay straight up.

The funny thing was when I measured the gap, it was just under an inch. That’s a very annoying number for a variety of reasons, but I was like, well, whatever, I’ll sand something down.

And I went down to the shop to find some wood and was poking around seeking something close, when I noticed some old fake-wood recycled-plastic decking samples that I’d got and not used for anything, and when I measured them, they were 25mm exactly – just under an inch.

And measuring it in metric and getting 25mm exactly is what made me realise that it was one metric inch. (TL;DR – it was an old USSR standard for converting stolen technology, particularly computer technology, to make the math easier in conversion to metric. Instead of 25.4mm/inch, it was 25.0mm/inch exactly.)

So I sanded down a bit of the faux woodgrain (not included in the 25mm measurement) and checked the desk again and the gap was, in fact, 25mm, and with a little tapping with a hammer, the fill block I cut fits perfectly.

The post no longer leans, and I now have had a real-life encounter with that historic oddity, the metric inch.

That’s a checkbox item I didn’t even know was on the list and didn’t really need to be checked, but goddamn if I haven’t checked it. Go me. I guess.

Let’s talk about wifi.

Let’s talk about the wifi in the recording studio.

Historically, I haven’t cared very much about the wifi in my studio. I don’t need it for much. I have a network connection, but it’s always been stupid and kind of broken. Part of that is not being able to put a wifi driver in a low-latency kernel without issues, so instead of a wifi card, I use a corded card and run to a wifi bridge. This shouldn’t be an issue.

The key word being “shouldn’t.”

I have discussed before how completely fucked this building is, on so many levels, when it comes to RF. I have talked about picking up FM radio on house wiring. I have talked about the many ways I have tried – eventually, with reasonable success – to get decent wifi working here at all.

I haven’t talked about the utter shitstorm and freakshow which is the studio space.

Here’s where I’ve historically put my little wifi bridge. (Well, this was after pulling it up for reasons, but basically here. A few centimetres from here.)

I get 0-300KBPS here. That’s garbage. The zero part, particularly. It’s fast enough, as long as you don’t try to move too much data, at which point it throws its hands in the air and surrenders, dropping to zero, where it stays for a while until it rests up and feels like having another go. When I didn’t actually have to use networking for much, that didn’t matter, and I moved large things around by putting them on USB keys and going to my laptop in another room.

That’s no longer quite as viable, with all the Intel CCS foolishness, and running multiple OSes, some of which like their network very much, thank you, and even kind of require it.

(And since I finally got a better graphics card, playing networked games needed some help, too.)

So, while running a very large file transfer that couldn’t be done with sneakernet and was going to take about a week to complete, I started fucking with it. First thing I did was pull the cords out of the baseboard (see above photo) and toss it to the side while I pulled some other wires.

This is when I noticed transfer went from about 80KBPS to 1.3MBPS. Instantly.

It still swung around a lot, but it stayed in a wide band of, oh, 500KBPS to 1.3MBPS as long as it sat there, which is to say, kind of near the door, in the centre of the walkway. And then it’d drop to zero for a while to rest up, but not often, and even with that, everything became dramatically better.

So I pulled cables around more so I could move the bridge a bit and see if I could get something more reasonable that was not in the worst possible place in the room, like, say, over by the couch, less than a metre away.

No.

Okay. How about over by the wall to the left of the door? Let’s test it by…

…no. I see.

I tried a lot of other places. None of them were better. Many were worse. Some much worse.

So let’s recap, shall we?

You can draw a bigger circle around that golden spot and you get basically the same numbers. It got worse moved further away. And those were the best places, other than the original, the Golden Spot, and one place partly down the hall which wouldn’t actually work out.

I have more than one of these bridges, of course. Swapping bridges did not help. Neither did swapping out cables, or power cords. All behaved exactly the same way, and all of these results were eminently duplicable.

So I got a really long pair of cables and ran the bridge to the other side of the couch, across the room, just to see what would happen.

what. the. fuck.

Mind you, that’s a second Golden Spot. I can move it round there and get worse numbers again, but they’re all dramatically better than the original spot or anywhere near it. In no cases do I get the kind of garbage I was getting on the other side of the room. But I could find – within half a metre – consistent 500-700KBPS, 1.5MBPS(ish), and so on. This was solid transmission numbers without data flooding issues (no buggering off for breaks), with very low packet loss rates. Still more packet loss than there should be, but it’s low enough you don’t really notice.

(Before you ask: this is further from the wifi hub, which is one floor below.)

So.

I kind of have this sorted. Heavy traffic no longer shuts down the connection, and ping times are sane – good, even, a mere 1-5ms to local servers, usually 1-3ms.

But

come

on.

Who designed this place, Ivo Shandor?

I got a pair of abandonware speakers, so I’m making them better. They’re going to end up as another musician’s monitors – I can’t make them true reference, but I can make them a lot closer – and better – pretty cheaply, basically by adding a tiny dome tweeter and a crossover circuit.

I ran a frequency sweep through the factory stock speaker (one on the left is still factory) and found that the single driver started dropping off pretty naturally at around 6000hz, so set the crossover there, first. That didn’t sound quite right so I moved it down to 5000hz so it wouldn’t have to strain, and that was much better.

(For the geeky: single-stage crossover, 7.8uF film cap on the tweeter, .27uH inductor for the primary driver. Sound is… it reminds me of an upgraded Minimus 7, with more low end.)

This is just a phone recording, so don’t expect much – it’s real light on bass, it recorded some, but not much of it, and not well – but still, it’s a before and after and at least gives you some idea about how much these things opened up.

Recording starts with “before” (factory stock) and after several seconds swithces to “after” (added tweeter and crossover circuit), then proceeds to alternate between the two.

I’ve updated the Kitting Out Cheap guide to building your home recording environment on a low budget. New additions include short commentary on kit microphones, updated interface information, and pointing out that hey, guess what – USB chipsets matter!

So, hiya, Home Recording panel attendees – here y’go!

As of 2:30am Saturday morning, I had a digital audio workstation again, lost partitions recovered – or, well, the important one recovered, the swap was damaged somehow but who cares, it’s swap.

It’s a good thing I was able to stop Tech Sport 7 from making trying to make the free space “active,” who knows what that would’ve done.

But, like a fool, I’m still trying to fix the Windows side, so I’ve been making a backup of the current Windows partition (validation pass just finishing up now) and then I’ll restore from a July backup, made before it stopped accepting security updates. Getting that out of the archives took 37 hours because yeah I’ll be re-evaluating my backup system. (It’s fine in theory but anything that involves making 1T images is probably not the best solution.) But it’s out, so as soon as validation of the backup of current Windows passes, we’ll be ready to try it.

What a mess.

Lots of artists (including a few I follow) livestream their drawing sometimes, usually showing their desktops so you can see what they’re working on. A fair number of them do this on Picarto, which is pretty visual arts focused, but says it’s for creators in general.

So I decided hey, maybe music? And they even have a category for it. Yay! And I’ve set up an account here on Picarto, and will stream sometimes, probably announcing on Tumblr and Facebook on the band page.

I’ve only tested it once and it was a little weird but I think it worked most of the time? The wifi in the part of the studio where I have to put the laptop is a little wonky tho’, and it cut out at least once. If people come by I’ll work on fixing that.

It’ll mostly be rehearsals/practice but might occasionally be me mixing something or writing something. I dunno! I’ll probably turn it on later today, I completely upended my planned VCON set and I’ll want to try that out this afternoon. And I’ll check the chat window every so often, too.

Today, Ubuntu Linux has decided I don’t get to log in to the desktop.

I can log in via a command line just fine. Just, you know, no GUI for me today.

It let me log in a couple of hours ago, but for WHO EVEN KNOWS reasons, I was getting a bunch of XRUNs suddenly, even when I just tried to copy a track internally. (XRUNs are buffer overflows or underflows resulting in lost data.) I think that’s because the software updater decided to restart itself after I disabled it. I even uninstalled it from the command line, but I think there are secretly two of them, one command-line based and one GUI based, because WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!

So I went through in the GUI and disabled that version too (because when it starts, it hits the disk for obvious reasons, and when you’re recording to disk, as I was, that’s bad), and while I was at it made Dropbox not autostart anymore since the first thing I always do is turn it off until I actually need it.

Then I ran apt-get update/apt-get upgrade manually (like I do always) and restarted.

Now, no GUI for me. Oh, it gives me a graphic login, and it looks like it starts to log me in, but then it says “eh, no” and blanks the screen and throws me back to login with a big HA HA FUCK YOU GUESS WHAT YOU GET TO DO TODAY INSTEAD OF WORKING ON MUSIC.

Ubuntu is not and will never be desktop ready. I know I’ve spent a lot of time talking about using Linux and running Ardour, but you know what? Ardour also ships for the Mac, and I am done with this horseshit. I have literally spent more time this last month working on making Ubuntu Linux work again after some new damn explosion than anything I might ever conceivably release, and this isn’t a one-off, Ubuntu just fucking explodes every so often now, and this isn’t worth it.

So, yeah. My job today is fixing this piece of shit OS again. But my other job is: start saving for a studio Mac. This insanity simply isn’t worth it.

eta: Y’know what? Two hours of failed searching later, this is stupid. I have a system partition image from less than a week ago. Maybe it wasn’t the system patches, maybe it was some other damn thing. I’ll restore the boot partition from that and pray it doesn’t happen when I reapply the security updates.

Hey, I don’t have any better ideas. I lose today regardless, so why not?

eta2: Restored previous boot partition, booted up fine, applied the security updates (apt-get update / apt-get upgrade), hosed again. It’s definitely the security updates.

hey guess what

hydrogen – a linux-based drum machine – has decided that its 151 beats per minute should be much faster than ardour’s 151 beats per minute.

i gotta tell you, this is turning into a “why do i even try” week. really is.

So, I’ve had my Gnome3 desktop up and running for a while (because Unity has not improved with time), and mostly things are okay! But there are small things bugging me.

My desktop, in tiny form, for reference:

Yes, that offset is intentional. The monitor mounting points don’t match.

ONE: Why aren’t these tips being clipped?

Peek-a-boo!

All the windows have them. Sometimes they’re black. So some sort of clipping isn’t. Is this because I’m using the open-source nvidia driver instead of the official one, or is something else going on?

TWO: I can’t run gnome-tweak-tool because it fails out if you don’t run pulseaudio. Is there a way around that? I suspect I might be able to solve item one if I could run item two.

THREE: I can make a link on the desktop to directories with ln -s, of course. But if I make one to Dropbox, the local-instance directory path ends up being /home/kahvi/Desktop/Dropbox instead of /home/kahvi/Dropbox, and even if I put things in the directory, and it is the right directory, Dropbox won’t sync it because the local reference at time of addition was wrong, and it never notices later so never syncs.

I can alt-F2 and type “Dropbox” and get the folder with the right local path, but that’s kind of lame. I can also pull up the Dropbox mini-app and go through a couple of menus to get there, but that’s also kind of lame. It’d be nicer if I could just click on the icon like I used to do. Or better yet, drag onto the icon, that’d be best.

None of these are really big deals, but it’d be nice to get them worked out, so if you have some tips, throw them into comments? Thanks!

After we got back, I discovered that my digital audio workstation had decided to Not anymore. No idea why; it was fine when I turned it off, it was Not At All Fine when I turned it back on.

I blame Bond, James Bond, somehow. Or maybe that turncoat Q. He used to be a supervillain scientist, you know. That bastard.

Anyway, since Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was going to fall out of support in the spring anyway, and since the problem appeared to be some sort of USB driver issue with the new sound interface, I decided I’d upgrade. That went… very badly. (See also, see also, see also, see also, there’s even more on my personal Facebook account, and none of this even covers the first half.)

But I did eventually get it working, and! I found a good use for an under-desk add-on keyboard tray. Look! It’s a LazyRack!

Hello!

Are you still there?

Targeting acquired!

I can do this because unlike my old interface, it’s meant to rack-mount, so almost everything is front-facing. Reclaimed desk space, and pushed back, all the cable ends are still out of the way! It’s great.

Also, I love these mic preamps oh my gods they are so much better. This probably won’t mean much to you listening on laptop speakers, but here’s a quick zouk sample straight into the mics I recorded last night, once I had things up and running. No processing at all, as there shouldn’t be… it’s… it’s just that these preamps (and same mics I’ve had before!) are picking up all these subtleties in the low-end that the TASCAM buried, and I’d have to dig back out with EQ and stuff. This is an absolutely raw recording and it’s all just there already.

It’s kind of like I didn’t just get new mic preamps, I got new microphones too thrown in.

I’ve written many times that you can do a lot on the cheap, and I think I’ve proven that, but I’ve also always said you’re trading time and knowledge (work) for money. I finally decided to run that trade the other way, and still ended up with a boatload of work thanks to Ubuntu. But for the improvements I’m hearing so far, in the studio? I’ll take it.