Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Around the Houses

So I picked up a hard drive at Micro Anvika after my Pilates Class & arrived at Mute to find a worried looking James. Logic would not start up - it was freezing at a certain plugin and the hard drive was clanking badly. I disconnected all peripherals (except the Logic Dongle and my iLok) but the problem persisted. The Mac was starting up erratically and clanking at Startup too. We had a brief meeting with Jeff and all agreed that something had to be done. The problem was definitely getting getting worse and more frequent.....no one had a better idea than reinstalling software, and if we were gonna reinstall we figured it was better to go to a new drive, in case the old drive was at fault. So, not really knowing what was going on, I reluctantly embarked upon a reinstall. Long Job.

In teh meantime Jeff was beavering away in the Mix Suite - implementing my tweaks from yesterday's mix and building up a great vibe on today's mix. I popped in and out to advise, steer and occasionally confuse.

Early in the evening I spoke to Sie Medway-Smith who is coming in to help with a bit of programming on one of the tracks (a potential single) that Daniel has a special vision of. He will be setting up in the edit suite - so we will be a real hive of Erasure activity for a while. One of my aims of the day was to bounce out all the parts for that room so the guys could build on what we have done so far and so they can experiment freely. So, well after midnight, and as as soon as I felt I had enough plugins installed I attempted to load that Logic song. Still Absynth 3 would not reinstall (complaining that it had already been deactivated on that machine ID - NOT!!) and I could not reinstall FM7 for some reason, so I put the "faulty" drive back in the machine to have one final attempt at bouncing out this song for tomorrow.


Of course everything runs as smooth as silk now - on the OLD drive (the one that had all the problems) No clanking, no freezing. I comfortably exported all 67 tracks and we all headed for home. Bemused, but job done.

I am betting the faulty drive will work fine for the rest of the production now. :-) As soon as I have the new drive all perfectly installed I shall be making a Disk Image, or a clone or something so that I can put it back together much quicker next time if I need to.

Goodnight.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

you know what , i stopped using NI stuff because their copy protection is really just annoying. I remember having to put the dynamo disk in about every 2 weeks....its just too much to handle :

Anonymous said...

im assuming you tried running the Logic AU Manager? it's a bit like when we had to remove extensions from start up in os9 but it can give quick control over which of our favourite noisemakers is giving us a headache.

cannot tell you how much ive enjoyed this blog. as a logic teacher and erasure fan since wonderland, its been sheer enjoyment!

Anonymous said...

Hard disks ! (don't you just wish you still worked with tape - ah no?)
I'm no computer geek (honest) but I work in the IT industry and picked up this tip. Put a HDD into the fridge (wrapped in tin foil) for a few hours. When you re-install and it works - back the sucker up and copy to a new disk. I personally wouldn't rely on a clanking disk - it's a bad sign of things to come!