Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Hmm. Looks like I'm going to miss Arisia again. :-( I'd been pondering whether to tell my bandmates that I would be out of town for Pirate Feast (they can manage without me if they have to; they just don't like to) to go to Arisia instead, since I missed it last year (and, IIRC, 2001, 2000, and 1999 as well, after having attended the first eight years of it in a row ... I should see whether I can verify that I'm remembering right) and it was one of my favourite conventions. But time has snuck up on me and that weekend is nearly upon us, I haven't said anything to my bandmates, and I'm really really broke and can't afford to go to Boston right now. At least this makes the decision easier -- I'll go earn a small fee performing at the Pirate Feast, not let down my bandmates, and not push my body so hard. But I do look forward to the year that I finally get back to Arisia and spend some time with the folks who never seem to get this far south. I'll be thinking of y'all this coming weekend (just not for a few hours on Saturday night).

Actually, I think it'd be really cool for The Homespun Ceilidh Band to perform at Arisia sometime. Our music goes over well at SF conventions, and I'd get to play in front of my Boston friends. In the meantime, look for our CD in the dealers' room -- I know Tales From The White Hart carries it, but I'm not sure whether they'll be there. And maybe I'll get to see some of you folks next year. (Of course, I'll see the folks who come down here for Balticon and Darkover sooner, plus anyone who catches up to me at Pennsic. And I do hope to get up to ConCertino. and maybe (if I'm lucky) Baitcon.)

I know that at least three people who read my journal are tech writers, and I'm pretty sure that two of those three aren't regular readers of Debbie Ridpath Ohi's Blatherings (relevant LJ links: ohiblather and ohi), so I figured I'd mention her newest web site, Inkygirl, a weblog for writers who work from home.

(And in other Debbie-related news just because I'm thinking of it at the moment, I'm really looking forward to hearing the new CD that Urban Tapestry is working on. Due sometime in the fall.)

Okay, I was given a used cassette deck a couple of days ago. This is a good thing, especially considering the huge pile of cassettes I've got that I haven't been able to listen to for ages. I unplugged my Stack O' Music Gear in the office and played with geometry a bit to see how things would stack without falling over, and whether I could get away with not having to bring more furniture into the room, build furniture, or get around to making a mini-rack-thingie for the mixer (which is designed as a rack-mount unit). Then I had to go do other stuff, so I didn't have any tunes in the office yesterday.

Now I've got other things I need to do, but I'm feeling restless and needed to distract myself, so I let myself start plugging components together. Now for any sane setup this isn't a big deal, but my audio setup is a bit kludgey. So it comes down to spending a bit of time puzzling out resource allocation and signal paths.

This could be a pain in the arse, except that as a puzzle it can be kind of fun if I'm in the right mood. At the moment I appear to be in the right mood. Here's what I've got ( uh, if you really want to bother with the list, that is )

Now the trick is to get as many inputs as possible hooked up in ways that let me send their signals where I want them to go before I run out of inputs, cables, or adaptors (the big limting factor at the moment is adaptors, mostly phono->phone ("RCA->quarter-inch") ones. Ideally, I want to set it up so that using it is completely intuitive and I can forget exactly how things are wired: the signals should just Go Where I Want Them without having to throw more switches than would ordinarily be obvious, or disconnect and reconnect things. I want to be able to send pretty much anything to the tape deck, the sound card, or the stereo amplifier at will, and to control the listening/recording volume of any signal from the mixer. And I want to be able to plug in an instrument and/or a microphone (possibly routing them through the multi-effects unit) and send those to the tape deck or the sound card. And I have to watch out for details like the tape deck not copying its input to its output unless the record button is pressed (which complicates the idea of daisy-chaining that and the amplifier on the tape in/out from the mixer), or feedback loops (which could be a problem if the tape deck didn't break the loop).

(The trick after that will be to find sound recording/mixing software that'll run under Win95 on a 120MHz Pentium without much RAM, or to move a Linux box up here from the server room the living room and find sound software that'll work on that (also underpowered).)

The only real time constraint is that I should get it done while I'm still feeling well enough to do the more important stuff on my to-do list. I've got the CD player coming out through the wee speakers, so I'm no longer tuneless.

A followup to my "distraction" post an hour or so ago ... I've got a less than ideal but definitely useable setup running now. I've got two channels left over for instruments/microphones, and I can get anything but the turntable routed into the sound card or the tape deck. (Hmm. If I want to convert LP to MP3, that's something I'll need to fix.) I can get anything but the turntable and the sound card into the multi-effects unit. I can listen to the radio when a selector switch on the boom box isn't flaking out (though I can't get WRNR (103.1FM) upstairs for some reason, so I'm listening to a classic rock station at 104.3FM instead). And the only time I have to reach all the way over to where the stereo amplifier is, is when I want to switch to/from the turntable (and I have to get up and walk around the equipment island to change records anyhow). ( more rambling about my hi-fi )

I'm pleased. I'd like a bigger mixer (so that I can run the turntable into the mixer after I get another amplifier working (gotta have a phono- balanced input) and still have channels left for instruments and microphones), and I still want to get the NT machine's sound card working and into the mix, but I have my tunes, I have a geeky stereo system that lets me Tweak Stuff and Route Stuff, and whether I get any of the more important stuff done that I need to do today or not, I feel like I've accomplished something. Something small, but something.