OH HAPPY DAY

Some news from the front, for clarification and edification.....

The third partner in our space, John Anderson, (no relation to the Yes man, who as we all know spells his name "Jon") will be leaving the nest as of the end of the month. Partly because he'll be out of town for the next two months, partly because his girlfriend is applying to grad schools outside of New York City, John has decided that he's no longer going to use the studio.

Now, this means a few things. About 6 months ago, John decided that he was going back to Macintosh computers, and bought a used G4 for the studio, loaded it up with OSX, and asked us if we'd like to go along for the ride. Since our previous computer was an aging G3 blue and white, we jumped on board. It was a very stressful couple of weeks as we changed not only computers but operating systems, audio plugins, and everything else. Cards and drives were moved from machine to machine, we battled with new configurations as we tried to port projects from DP3 (OS9) to DP4 (OSX). We were making a few records at the time (like Ice-a-Tone's), which added to the, er, excitement.

Not fun.

Eventually, we got everything moved over, and managed to set up a new, fairly stable system, albeit with lower functionality (some lost plugins, mostly). OSX is much nicer when DP crashes. We were just getting comfortable...

Well, now the computer is leaving, and we were given about two weeks notice. Tomorrow is the scheduled computer removal date. So here we go again.

Tonight I guess we'll pull our drives back out, remove the cards, and start trying to set up the G3 to run DP again. I honestly don't know if it'll be able to handle OSX with the projects we're currently working on, but the thought of trying to port everything back over to 9 is more than a little scary. We're saving up for the next computer, which will have to be another used G4 (onward to eBay! And Craig's list!) Not to mention the fact that we'll be losing a Midi Timepiece AV (about $600), which handles all the MIDI for the studio and allows us to synch up our ADAT's, as well as some controller keyboards. And a third of the rent. And when that new computer comes... you know the story. Get the screwdrivers back out.

At least we aren't working on any records.