Over the past couple weeks I’ve been working on a song. Not one of my own, mind you, so no reason to get excited or anything, but it was interesting nonetheless. Jon recorded a band a while back (I’ll refrain from naming them here, but they sound kind of like a mix between AC/DC and the Toadies… with more sexual innuendo, if that’s possible) and asked me if I’d do a completely stereotypical and distasteful dance remix of one of the songs. I’d love to!
See, I haven’t really worked on music much lately. I got burned out on it pretty bad after I moved to Nashville, and it wasn’t really enjoyable for a long time. I’ve worked on a few little things, mostly tuning vocals for a song here and there, but nothing really big. In the midst of this gigantic hiatus, some interesting things have happened. Namely, the release of REAPER. Ever since I heard about it, I’ve been dying to get the chance to do some real work with it. This remix was perfect for finally getting to dig in and start learning some of the nuts and bolts.
The workstation I’m using is an Athlon FX62, 2GB of RAM… it normally runs Ubuntu Linux and works as a home theater PC. But, for working with REAPER, I needed Windows. Thankfully, some months ago when I set the computer up, I had enough foresight to know I would want to do this and installed Windows Vista. Now, Vista was not my first choice. I wanted to install Windows XP. Unfortunately, Windows XP needs a driver floppy for my SATA controller. Not only do I not have the driver floppy for it, I don’t have the floppy drive to put it in. So, XP thinks I don’t have any hard drives. That leaves me with Windows Vista. And really, it wasn’t that bad. I used it to play through Call of Duty 4 (which, incidentally, is the greatest game ever in the history of everything) and a few other things aside from playing around with REAPER.
Fast forward to last week, when I started working on the remix. I was having fun, learning my way around REAPER, exercising some musical creativity and whatnot. Everything was good. Until yesterday that is. Yesterday, Jon came over to hang out while I finished the track up (I was going to turn it in today). As it turns out, Microsoft pushed out an update for Vista that locked my computer into an endless cycle of reboots. Turn the computer on, it says something like “Installing updates state 3 of 3 0%” or something and then reboots. Microsoft have not offered a fix other than to reinstall Windows. How ridiculous is that? They pushed out an official update that kills who knows how many thousands of people’s computers and essentially all they can say is, “Oops.” Needless to say, the song wasn’t finished. I haven’t quite decided what to do with the 45GB of new hard drive space I have now that I obliterated that Vista partition. Maybe you have some suggestions.
I’ve always had a distaste for Microsoft products, but I would use them as a necessary evil to partake of some of my favorite software… things like REAPER and CoD4. But, not anymore. I’ll just run REAPER in Wine from now on and if I want to play games, I’ll buy a PS3 or a Wii. Microsoft will not be getting any more of my money.
There’s also a Yahoo News article on my issue if you’d like to read a little bit more about it.
