Nothing kills creativity and inspiration quicker than the fucked up technology we have become accoustomed to using. Just to prove it, I started typing this post and then wordpress just fucked up and lost everything – fortunatly it was only a few words, but it still pisses me off.
But here I’m talking about musical creativity, and yes this is both a rant and a whine.
Being an electronic musician, I am kind of dependent on technology. I use Cubase for the simple reason that I’ve been using it for decades, its what is on my machine, and I just don’t seem to get along with other systems. A note on discloseure: I’m not being paid by Steinberg or Microsoft or any such corporation, so I can slate their products to the extent to which libel laws will allow me.
I’ve had some delays in my production schedule starting since last year when I had a look at proSonus. I didn’t like the software, nor the customer service of the company, so I ridded myself of the package. But it was after that that the trouble started. Everytime I shut cubase down, the drivers for my DAC would corrupt and give me an endless reconnection thump that was only silenced by rebooting several times and messing with the settings.
Needless to say, this monumental inconvenience became an aversion to launching any music package. Launching such a bloated application introduces a frustrating delay anyway, but that has to be accepted. The inability to close it without having to piss around is a total deal breaker. Obviously, I did all the usual of reinstalling drivers, changing cables, clearing out the registry and so on. I even went to the expense of getting a new firewire card, SSD drive, and cooling. Eventually, I took the nuclear option and made a fresh install of windows on the new drive – with all the farting about that entails.
All in all, this culminated in about seven months of irritation and lost productivity where I only have the demo of one song done. I started a new tune today, and guess what – cubase crashed and lost it all for me.
The moral of this story? I don’t think there is any valid learning point except to fuck it all off and bugger off to the pub (now they are back open).
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