Following part 1 and part 2, here is the third installment of this exciting series of posts.
The third music-making project I’ve been busy with these days is a new song: The Playground of the Baby Giants. If you’ve been following sknoblog at all, you might remember that I relatively recently spent a week in a large, famous city of the United States. This city had quite an impact on me, and I knew I had to write about those feelings. I recently came up with the basic idea (as illustrated by the song title), wrote the music and lyrics last week, and recorded the vocals yesterday.
Now normally, I would have posted the new song to my site, and this post would have been an official announcement. BUT… Therein lies a sad, stupid story:
After doing a mix and listening to it over and over again, I decided that my voice was too « up-front ». So last night, after a long day of recording (and translating), I decided to fix this. Which I did. I went into my Digital Audio Workstation software program (MOTU Digital Performer), lowered the fader on the voice, and « printed » a new mix. I then went looking for the mixdown file in order to master it in another program (Peak). I then noticed that my (external) hard disk was running low on space, and decided I would trash the « Undo » folder for the project. Except that I trashed the contents of the « Audio » folder instead, and instantly lost all of the audio files generated for the project!!!
Now, I can regenerate the keyboard parts easily enough, as they are MIDI-based, but to get back to where I was, I would have to re-record all the guitar and voice parts, which is not trivial. Besides, I was quite happy with, and used to the existing performance, warts and all.
I had an old Norton Utilities lying around, so I connected my hard disk to my old iMac G3 and ran the « unerase » program. After several long overnight hours, I woke up to the results (after a terrible night dreaming of the missing audio files) only to discover that it had found none of them.
So as we speak, I am running an « unerase » from TechTool Pro, another recovery and repair utility, in hopes that it might fare better. Still several hours to go for it to scour the entire, nearly full, 180 GB disk.
If that doesn’t work, well, I must either re-record, or decide to live with the first mix, which I still have because it wasn’t in the Audio folder I emptied. As anyone who has listened to my stuff knows, while I can be a perfectionist at the compositional stage, I am certainly no perfectionist at the performance / mixdown / sound quality stages. So right now, I’m betting that if recovery fails, I’m going to learn to live with the existing mix, and so will you, dear devoted fans…
What a fucking idiot…