Ramblings From Justin Penney

We had a computer die and I took Jacey's laptop and moved the studio computer to be the household computer. The laptop has a Celeron processor and that's a no go with Pro Tools. I don't understand why, but it doesn't work. I added a firewire card and went back to Sonar.

Moving from Sonar to Pro Tools was difficult. Sonar has a lot of flexibility built in. I also had much better audio hardware, a MOTU 828mkII. The M-Audio FW1814 is just not the same caliber of hardware. Going back to Sonar was really hard.

Pro Tools may be limited on hardware but it works really well. I always monitored through Pro Tools with no issue. I had lots of plugins running and the workflow just started to feel right. When I went back to Sonar I felt like I was swimming in mud. I had to do cue mixes in the M-Audio control panel, which is horrible compared to the MOTU one. On the laptop the problem with the software knobs not working resurfaced. It is tremendously frustrating to grab a volume knob, turn it and have nothing happen. I didn't like the M-Audio control panel when I had a Delta 1010 either, I kept an 8 to 16 channel mixer in my rig and just used it like a tape deck. That is still my preferred work flow but given that I record part time musicians and vanity projects recalling on a mixer would be a terrible time sucker.

I bought a little Iomega network drive to hold all the music and pictures that we have on the current family computer. I'm copying everything to that then re-installing the machine to use for my studio. The laptop, with a failing battery, is moving to be the general purpose computer.

# posted by Justin @ 4:12 PM