sibylle

For a variety of reasons, I was later getting down to the studio to start recording than I'd hoped. I fired up the Apollo unit, woke up the computer, and discovered that they were not talking to each other. Again.

I unplugged and replugged the Thunderbolt cable with no improvement. I rebooted the computer. Same story.

I can't get work done with the machine behaving this way. It was now time to go to my backup plan and build a new computer. Today.

I went to the Micro Center website and threw together a configuration based on the research that I did last weekend. It has twice as much storage and RAM as the current machine, because it didn't cost that much more. I wanted the same case that I had for the old machine, but Micro Center doesn't carry Antec cases and the soonest that I could get one of the Silent series cases here from either Amazon or Newegg was about two weeks which was not any help for the time frame that I'm looking at, so I grabbed a Fractal Design case and am hoping that it is reasonably quiet, given the minimum number of moving parts. If not, I can always cannibalize an old case and move things around, but that was not going to be today's project.

The one thing that I couldn't get was a CD-R drive, but I *can* get one of those from Amazon to show up here tomorrow. I placed the order and tore out for Micro Center so I could get the parts and get back home tonight.

It took about two hours (and a modicum of swearing and dropped screws), but the machine is now assembled, save for the optical drive which can easily be popped in tomorrow.

And then we'll fire it up and see how it works. Which will be tomorrow evening's project.

I am going to buy the old machine from Dodeka for whatever it is worth and use that to help defray the cost of the new box. Gretchen is going to need a new desktop to replace the one that is ten plus years old (the previous studio computer) and which will absolutely, positively never run Windows 11. This machine is wretched overkill for what she'll do with it, but that's ok. :)

Just for those observing, the total cost of this build will be well less than half of the cost of some of the fancy pre-built recording computers that I could buy. And it has a fancy gaming motherboard, because that got me the right combination of ports on the back.

The best thing about it is that I can have it tomorrow.

I hope...

I am not thrilled by troubleshooting. I am even less thrilled when the trouble shoots back.

You may recall the incident a few weeks ago where I installed a BIOS upgrade on my studio computer and killed my Thunderbolt port which is highly necessary to being able to do recording. Eventually, I managed to roll back the BIOS "upgrade", get the studio functioning again, and have been down here merrily recording tracks.

Today, I came downstairs, woke up the computer, and it stubbornly refused to see the Thunderbolt interface. Great.

Step one was to try all of the non-invasive stuff. I unplugged the cable and plugged it back in. I turned it over, which should make no difference, but occasionally does. I got down on the floor and checked to be sure that the cable was still plugged into the interface. (I do not so much hate getting down on the floor as I do getting *up* from the floor. In any case, the cable was plugged in correctly.)

Of course, at this point, I *still* didn't know whether the failure was on the computer end or the interface end. But my laptop has a Thunderbolt port, so I got K to (grudgingly) bring it downstairs so that I could plug the cable from the interface in there. And the laptop saw the interface, so the problem had to be the computer.

At this point, I powered down the computer, opened up the case, pulled out the Thunderbolt card, reseated the cable on the motherboard header, and put the Thunderbolt card back in. I fired up the computer and it now saw the interface.

And there was much rejoicing. And some muttering.

Everything is now reassembled and still working. I am hoping that it stays that way.

I have priced a backup plan, which involves pulling the motherboard, CPU, and RAM out of the studio computer and installing it in a case upstairs with a motherboard that is too old to run Windows 11; then installing a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM combination that includes built-in Thunderbolt ports. That's going to cost a lot of money before I am done even if I don't replace any other parts in the process. And it will take a lot of time.

I am hoping not to need the backup plan. We'll keep an eye on this.

I have a great many things to do and too little time to get them done. I know that some of the things that I want to get done are going to get triaged until a later date.

This is one of the reasons that I am very happy that we managed to get the garage cleaned out so that I can park my car in there during the current heat wave. Not only does it make getting into and out of the car more pleasant, but it is something that is actually *done*. :)

The Cardinals beat the Cubs in the second game of their series down in St. Louis by a final of 8-7 as Nolan Arenado made a bare-handed grab of a high-bouncing ball, followed by the throw to first to retire Dansby Swanson for the third out of the ninth as the tying run was heading home from third.

Defense is frequently underrated.

I swear that I am going to find the chord diagram generator again and use it to add diagrams of some of the odder chords to my PDFs that I play from. The problem is that when I haven't played a song for a while and then I encounter something that I have notated as "A aug5 sus4" where I have *clearly* gotten that notation from some chord naming program, I just start to swear.

I have concluded that "A aug5 sus4" is "take AMaj7 and move it up one fret and make sure that you hit the high E string", as opposed to the same song's "Bm7/A" which I'm pretty sure is "take AMaj7 and move it up one fret and make sure that you hit the fifth string and *mute* the first string".

Grumble.

I got through another three songs today, adding new guitar tracks and sometimes new scratch vocals. This gets me halfway through the album.

I also found *another* song that I have shifted to a different key since I recorded the scratch tracks, so that's been rebuilt now. I'm looking at the lyric sheet which clearly indicates that the song is in E and then I start the playback and hear my cheerful announcement that the song is in the key of A.

No, no, it is not. Not any more...

It is sad when the *second* worst thing that happened last night was Ruby getting skunked again.

I had plans to do a lot of recording this weekend. Now, whenever I need to do some recording, I usually wander down to the studio and discover that it is time to install a whole bunch of updates. It was pushing 9 PM, so I figured I could quickly run down to the studio, install the updates, and hit the ground running today.

I already knew that there was a Cubase point release that I should go ahead and install, so I did that. Then I noticed that there were three Intel updates waiting to be installed. Ok, I could take care of that too. No problem. A couple of reboots, but no problem.

The Intel update screen lists (among other things) my motherboard type and the current BIOS version. I looked at that and said to myself, "That BIOS is pretty old. I wonder if there is a newer one that I should install." This was my first mistake.

On the ASUS website, there was a brand-new BIOS for my motherboard, less than a month old. Looked good, so I figured I'd install it. This requires putting it on a memory stick, booting into the BIOS, and then loading it from there. I've done this sort of operation before, so I didn't have too much trouble with it. There was also a newer version of the Intel ME utility, so I installed that too. All good.

Having installed a new version of Cubase, I figured I'd fire it up so that it could inspect all of the plugins, because that sometimes can slow things down on the first restart. Still no problem.

Well, there was no problem until Cubase told me that I needed to pick an ASIO driver. It should just default to the Universal Audio Thunderbolt driver. Except I picked that and Cubase said "What Thunderbolt device?"

Oh, that is bad. Let me start up the UA application and see if it sees the Apollo unit. It does not. And the Thunderbolt cable is plugged in. Ack!

I start searching the Internet. Apparently, this is a problem with older versions of the ASUS Thunderbolt add-in card when the BIOS for this type of motherboard (and its various relations) gets updated. I check the Device Manager and it tells me that there is a problem with the Thunderbolt port. Yes, I had figured that out. Removing the device and putting it back does not help.

Maybe there is a newer driver or firmware for the Thunderbolt card. There's no new driver, but there is new firmware. I set up to flash the card with the new firmware and discover that it won't take it.

Apparently, there are *two* slightly different versions of this card. I have the older one, which will not take this update. There does not appear to be an update for the older card.

Maybe I can get a newer version of the Thunderbolt card. Micro Center does not carry this card. Amazon does. They can get it to me around July 1st, which is not compatible with recording this weekend. Or next weekend.

Ok. How can I get up and running? I *do* have a laptop with Cubase installed *and* a Thunderbolt port, but that is the same port that it uses for charging. About now, I realize that I could probably bodge things together with a Thunderbolt dock, but it was approaching midnight last night and I was running out of brain cells.

The latest generation of PC motherboards has a number of boards that support Thunderbolt directly on the back panel ports. My new office PC is one of those. I am not going to move my freshly-configured office PC to the basement for this. Really not.

I could *buy* a new motherboard. Which will require buying a new processor and new RAM. And a new heatsink. That is going to be annoyingly expensive and a whole lot of work, but is an available backup plan.

Let's try reverting to an older version of the motherboard BIOS. What version had I started with? Eventually, I realized that I still had it on the computer in installable format, so I copied it to the memory stick, rebooted, and installed the older BIOS. So far, so good. Let's boot up the computer.

The computer does not boot up. It beeps eight times. My phone tells me that this is a sign of a problem with the CMOS memory on the computer.

I am old. I know what to do about this. I shut off the power to the computer, pull the plug, and pull the CMOS battery. If I wait until morning, the computer will forget all of the BIOS settings and I should be able to get back into the machine. (Later, I check the manual and find the location of the two pins that I need to short to clear the CMOS. They are inconveniently buried behind the Thunderbolt card. I try fishing at them in the morning with a screwdriver, because why not? I'm not sure if I ever got to them...)

It is now nearing midnight and time to head up to bed.

At some point during this fiasco, Julie comes downstairs to tell me that Ruby has encountered a skunk, so if I smell something when I go upstairs, don't panic. It is apparently less bad than some of the previous skunkings. Gretchen has rubbed the dog down with some odor killer called "Pooph" and the report is that it has improved the situation. Gretchen, meanwhile, has gone off to the bedroom, having had enough of all of this for the night.

When I get upstairs, things are not *too* stinky, so I turn off the kitchen exhaust fan and head upstairs to join Gretchen. It is a *long* time before I can manage to get to sleep (which includes watching another episode of "Leverage" so that we can both wind down).

This morning, I get up, get cleaned up, and head down to the basement. I fish around for the clear CMOS pins, decide that I am not going to remove the Thunderbolt card to try to get at them right now, and put the battery back in. Then I fire up the computer.

Happily, after a mild round of complaints, it boots into the BIOS. I turn the Thunderbolt support back on and reboot. Windows fires up, I start the UA application and it informs me that there is no Apollo unit attached.

Then I plug the Thunderbolt cable back in. And now I have a connection! And there is much rejoicing.

And then I fire up Cubase and it tells me that there is no device connected. So I fire up the UA Console app, see the message "Connecting to Apollo", and now Cubase can see the device and lets me select the Thunderbolt ASIO driver. I open up a song, hit play, and there is sound from the speakers.

My mood is *greatly* improved.

So, kids, this is why you just shouldn't mess with a system that is working. Just ask old Uncle Bill.

In other news, the house still smells mildly of skunk downstairs and we are trying to air it out. Ruby does not seem to be very skunky, for which I am thankful.

At least I didn't have to run out and buy peroxide last night.

My annual required training for work is now completed. Yay, me!

I have also fixed all of the bugs that popped up in the scan from the static code analysis tool. Also, yay, me!

And I found the bug in the compile of an older feature branch that was introduced when we mixed the new jar from their project with their fixes for the static code analysis tool with the old branch that doesn't have those fixes yet.

In other news, we decided to make superburger for dinner tonight. I had figured that we would have potato chips with it, but when I was looking for the cranberry pecan chicken salad at Sam's Club to bring back for Gretchen, I found a tub of their loaded potato salad, which includes sour cream, cheddar cheese, and bacon. It is very good.

It is also a three pound tub of this stuff. I foresee a lot of potato salad in the near future.

Today, I started on the various bits of mandatory training at work. There are a lot of them.

Tomorrow, I hope to finish them. :)