Blogging and Convalescence

So, after the three days of partying, there was the one lost day: Sunday. Truth be told, the day wasn't actually lost. I prepared my pics and videos from Saturday night, uploaded them, blogged up the rest of the weekend, did a bit of reading, fiddled around on Ableton Live's tutorials, did a fair bit of shopping on Beatport, and forced myself into bed around 1am (which was difficult, considering I hadn't been to bed before 6am the past 3 nights).

In fact, I had a bit of difficulty with Ableton Live: I would click on a track in the file browser, and Live would start to preview it, but then would come to a halt after a few seconds. Then, the entire program would slow down immensely and pretty much all audio operation came to a halt. After a bit of trial-and-error, I realized that this was because Live was creating an analysis file for the track I was previewing, and since it was a full-length track (i.e. 8 minutes long rather than 3 seconds) the processor strain overcame the program's buffers. These analysis files allow Live to know what to expect throughout the file, what sort of tempo it is at, and how best to warp it to fit other tempos. As it turns out, Live takes a bit of time to produce analysis files for large files (no surprise there), but the analysis files (*.asd) persist after the first time, so I just selected the entire directory of tracks I bought from Beatport, set them all to be analyzed, and went to bed. Mind you, I think I still need to check the audio buffer size and and the decoding cache to make sure things are running smoothly. Also, I haven't adjusted for overall latency in my laptop's audio setup, which might be significant, considering half of my "rig" runs through a USB 2.0 port (iMic).

Anyway, that's it for now. I was going to blog about my shopping on Beatport and how a certain record label pretty much sums up microhouse/minimal for me and encapsulates what I'm currently really into...but it's late and I'm rather tired. Coming soon, nonetheless!