Just a small update so my readers know why I haven’t written much in the last 2 months:

• Exhaustion - Working 8-10 hours a day writing software and documentation means that my physical ability to continue writing on my website is diminished.
  • I use speech to text most of the day, and after 7-10 hours I’m already mentally and orally fatigued from the process. I need to switch my mental process to something else.
  • Simply sitting in front of a computer all day curtails my appetite for engaging with a computer screen in my off hours.
• Software - I was unable to build and deploy this site for 6 weeks because of a dependency issue with Jekyll on my system. I spent nearly 30 hours trying to figure it out, including attempting to completely nuke ruby from my system. Demoralizing and vexing.
  • I STILL don’t know what’s wrong. I’m on a new computer that seems to work.
    • Not being able to properly write on the same system that I do most of my music/hobby work on makes it difficult to stay motivated to write new content.
• Pneumonia - I spent this last 2 weeks (one of which was supposed to be my vacation!) with bacterial pneumonia. As of this post it is still not fully cleared.
  • I suggest against having pneumonia. It is quite unpleasant.
• Disenchantment - Not burnout, I still love toying around with audio software, taking notes, testing etc… However, my desire to publish my thoughts to the public has been atrophied. It’s a combination of oral fatigue, nasty e-mails, shrinking communities (or moving to new platforms?) and a more fulfilling dayjob.
  • I would say that 95% of this website is a result of me being bored with the work or time I spent working on audio engineering tasks. I’m not bored during the day anymore (and I don’t work primarily on audio/music). Fulfillment happens elsewhere. The yearning to fill in the gaps with writing is nullified, I fill in the gaps as part of my daily working process now.
• It might sound silly, but the Digital Performer 11 update was depressing, in the literal sense. When that was released, I simply lost all interest in audio software as a concept. I’ve plugged along using Logic Pro X without a single thought of ‘software’. I’m not sure I’ve surmounted that psychological hurdle yet. What a rubbish update, and if that’s what people truly want then well…

I’ve been working through my thoughts to come up with an adaptation to these changes. It’s a slow process, as I’m continually skeptical of each supposed epiphany, conclusion or burst of motivation.

That said, I still have 2 more Mixbus posts to finish :) I will be updating the site features (DAW Chart, DAW Wants and FreeBees) as time and pneumonia recovery permit.

Along with this post, I’ve hopefully fixed the issue with the header system. Interviews should display correctly.

The Health page has been updated with information about my leg braces and some lifestyle changes. I’ve also updated pharmaceutical information for migraines.

Meta

This post took:

• 30 hours to screw with Ruby, and fail.
• 12 hours to come up with a workable solution to the header issue on interviews and long-winded topics.
• 2 hours to update the Health page
• 3 hours to get distracted and mess with Digital Performer 11 again. It’s still hooey.
• 1.75 hours to write this.

Part 2 has taken a while, but we’re here, and let’s go.

Current using Mixbus 7.0.140

Other parts in this series:

• Latency

Mixbus 7 is out and I’ll be exploring the new feature(s) in the next 4 posts.

I’ve heard that Mixbus 7 might have better latency, so let’s start it off with the elephant in the room: Mixbus latency.

Other parts in this series:

• Recorder and TapeX

I’ve been working for 2.5 weeks on a new post, and I thought I’d give an update of how it’s going.

• My editor/dev environment does not work. ~11 hours of my weekend.
  • Please stop refactoring things for no reason. PLEASE. It doesn’t mean you’re productive.
• My dev environment doesn’t work again because of another refactoring commit. ~4 hours.
• Audio Interface that I use for testing does not work
  • The device would stop playback on certain songs (!!)
  • Turns out that multiple 0dbFS samples at a specific frequency range would cause the device to attempt to reboot but fail.
  • After 5 hours of tinkering - a bad diode.
• My MCU that I use for latency testing doesn’t turn on. I can’t find the code that was on it.
  • Order new device and wait.
  • Reverse engineer what the code was doing. ~8 hours
  • Realize I was incorrect. ~30 seconds.
  • Rewrite it correctly. ~45 minutes.
• Document my software incorrectly, confused as I can’t use the thing I wrote. ~2 hours.
• Figure out why I can’t see my oscilloscope on my LAN. ~3 hours.
  • I could! It was reporting the wrong ip!
• My house starts leaking during a storm.
  • Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
  • DO go out in a torrential downpour and 35mph winds, hop on a ladder, clean the clogged gutters.
    • Reminder, I can barely walk. ~70 minutes in the pouring rain.
• Broke my new leg braces. -10 to Stamina. Wait 3 days until they can be fixed.
• Get sidetracked dreaming about a new comment system for the site. ~5 hours
• Start writing an article about FLStudio to realize that I don’t want to spend my time that way. ~5 hours.
• Try to fix the headers on this site that are too long. ~2 hours.
  • Not yet fixed. I don’t have an idea that seems to work, let alone an implementation.
• Taxes. ~7 hours.

This isn’t twitter, but here I am: complaining.

When I was working on music full-time, a lot of these things gotten eaten by ‘work’ time or it was simply carry-over of my normal day. Now it’s my evenings and weekends after already staring at monospaced text on a computer screen all day.

I’ll get there. It’s been rough.

Meta

This post took:

• 30 minutes to write.
• ~47 hours of frustration.

Time for some site updates!

I wanted to add more “Site Features” (static pages that are constantly updated) and I was running out of room in the nav. I also frequently receive complaints about how textually busy the site update is. I’ve aimed to improve both of these problems with this update.

• Removed Google Analytics
  • The only remaining external javascript dependency is disqus… that will be the next target.
• New site layout!
  • Site Nav - I found the site nav difficult to use.
    • Increased size of elements
    • Increased size of header
    • Removed busy recent/tag sidebars(!) - It is an extra click, but I’ve never felt that they present the information well.
    • Added simple left-nav
      • It sucked when I made it.
      • Wife helped me make it not suck.
    • Move tags year/type widget
  • Post Layout
    • Adjusted header spacings.
    • Allowed header to gracefully fail on different viewport sizes
    • Remove section hierarchy in posts
    • Add dynamic in-page breadcrumbs
      • On desktop as you scroll, the current header and sub-headers attache to the top of the screen to display your reading position in the outline.
      • This breaks all of the interviews pages. I’m aware. I don’t have a fix yet.
  • Pagination is back.
    • I set it to paginate in 20… but it’s only showing 10. I’m skeptical. Please let me know if it’s broken :)
  • Each post has a previous/next post button at the botton now.
  • Themes
    • New Theme Color - Dark Green!
    • Updated theme pickers with indicator
    • Yellow theme is now darker
    • Theme color boxes are a bit more desaturated and more accurate.
  • Cleanup
    • Fixed a number of tags
    • Fixed all sorts of weird stuff I missed
      • My wife found them, thank you.
• New feature!
  • Health - I get a few e-mails a week about my health, so I thought I’d put up a full page about it. My hope is that this disclosure will help other people with similar problems navigate their options and know they are not alone.
• Updated About page
• Updated Favourites - specifically the EDC section (and some other minor updates)
• Added “Last Updated” to all static pages.

The REAPER series has ended. The end of this series is somewhat unexciting, but it was a lot of work for me.

The result is The REAPER Settings Page. A list of all of my changed REAPER settings, with explanations of why I made the change.

Jump through to see some of my discussion about REAPER in general.

Currently using REAPER 6.23

• 30 days of Starting over with REAPER
• Rants and GUI Tweaks (again)
• Designing MIDI commands
• MIDI Command Inventory
• Item Editing Design and Inventory
• Project Template, Preferences and Mouse Modifiers
• Hotkeys, again! ...?
• Look Ma! No Hands

I’m going to let you in on a secret. Don’t tell anyone though.

While working (Software Developer/Tech Writing), I haven’t used my keyboard for the entire week for work related tasks. Not only that, I’ve been more productive than otherwise.

I’ve also not used my keyboard for REAPER since late December. Soon, I won’t be using my mouse at all either.

I’m using Talon Voice and it’s been amazing. Let me walk you through how this works with REAPER, and I’ll explain my Dev use in another post.

• 30 days of Starting over with REAPER
• Rants and GUI Tweaks (again)
• Designing MIDI commands
• MIDI Command Inventory
• Item Editing Design and Inventory
• Project Template, Preferences and Mouse Modifiers
• Hotkeys, again! ...?
• An evaluation and conclusion

I’m on Vacation until at least January 2nd. That means no working on articles!

I’ll be spending most of my time learning to use Talon Voice, which has been an incredible boost to my productivity and well-being. Improving my Talon config is my #1 priority currently.

I’m currently paused on Day 24 of the REAPER do-over series.

In the last post I changed what hotkeys mean in the context of mouse modifiers.

Now I need to think about what they mean in the context of hotkeys.

Currently using REAPER 6.18

• 30 days of Starting over with REAPER
• Rants and GUI Tweaks (again)
• Designing MIDI commands
• MIDI Command Inventory
• Item Editing Design and Inventory
• Project Template, Preferences and Mouse Modifiers
• Look Ma! No Hands
• An evaluation and conclusion