DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I need more input channels. My DAW, a Digidesign 002-Rack, has 4 mic pres, 4 line ins, and a bunch of digital inputs I’ve never tried to use because I had no other digital gear.

I’ve been able to maximize the inputs on the 002 via an external analog mixing board, a Mackie 1604, which has 16 of Mackie’s VLZ Pro mic pre’s. In a nutshell, I can use the mixer to combine multiple mics into fewer channels, e.g.: mic 4 toms individually via the Mackie, mix them to stereo, and therefore only consume two of the 8 analog inputs on the 002-Rack. I can effectively mic my kit this way, e.g.: two kick mics (mixed to mono), two snare mics, hi-hat, stereo overheads, stereo room mics. Or: kick, snare, hi-hat, stereo overheads, stereo toms, mono room mic.

Both these approaches, and their varations, are adequate. But for better control, and more options at mixdown, I’d rather capture two kick mics, two snare mics, individual tom mics, plus all the other stereo stuff, and maybe a mic in the stairwell too. You know how it goes.

There are a number of new products that are designed with me in mind: lots of mic pre’s, digital output. After surveying the market I narrowed my choices to two:

• Mackie Onyx 800R
• Focusrite Octopre LE

Feature-wise, they’re very similar:

 +------------+------+------+--------+----------+--------+--------+--------------+
 |                   | Line | Direct | Line     | Phase  | High   |   Phantom    |
 |            | Pres | Ins  |  Ins   | Outs     |Reverse | Pass   |    Power     |
 +------------+------+------+--------+----------+--------+--------+--------------+
 |  Onyx 800R |  8   |  2/8 |   2    | Via DB25 |   8    |   8    |    Indiv.    |
 | Octopre LE |  8   |   8  |   2    |    8     |   1    |   8    | All or none  |
 +------------+------+------+--------+----------+--------+--------+--------------+
 +------------+-------+-------+-----------+-----------+-------+-------+--------------+----------+
 |            |  Word Clock   |           |   Sample  | ADAT Lightpipe| AES/EBU/SPDIF| Mid/Side |
 |            |  In   |  Out  | Bit Depth |   Rates   |  In   |  Out  |    Outputs   |  Decoder |
 +------------+-------+-------+-----------+-----------+-------+-------+--------------+----------+
 |  Onyx 800R |  BNC  |  n/a  |   16/24   | Up to 192 |  n/a  |  Yes  |      Yes     |    Yes   |
 | Octopre LE |  BNC  |  BNC  |     24    |  44.1/48  |  Yes  |  Yes  |      n/a     |    n/a   |
 +------------+-------+-------+-----------+-----------+-------+-------+--------------+----------+

The main difference, according to both manufacturers, is the quality of the pre’s. Of course, both makers claim their pre’s are superior. But that’s always the case.

The price difference is nontrivial — the 800R streets for $1000, whereas the Octopre costs $800 (including the ADAT card).

None of the feature differences seemed compelling. I love the idea of having a mid-side decoder (as on the 800R) because I’ve had issues with phase problems in stereo recording. However, I own only one figure-of-8 mic, a Beyer M-380, and it’s probably not suitable for the sorts of things I’d like to record via mid-side, e.g. my dulcimer.

I believe the Octopre is limited to 24-bit output, which I’d like to be able to use, but if my host or firewire drive can’t manage 13 channels @ 24 bit, I’d need to run at 16 bit. Or buy expensive new computer gear.

So, unable to decide, I bought one of each.

I’ve read positive reviews of both units, but I haven’t seen a head-to-head comparison, which is what I really wanted: sure, both pre’s sound great… but which sounds better?

Tune in for Part II…

Tags: octopre, 800r, daw, protools, shootout, onyx, mackie, focusrite
posted to channel: Music
updated: 2006-04-01 06:32:40

Turns out the source of my hardware problems was a bad stick of RAM — a ~$100 memory module cost me a couple days’ worth of time. Argh.

When the symptoms first started appearing, I had the idea to run memtest, but that requires burning a CD and booting from it — and I don’t have physical access to the machine. Sucks.

This was the beginning of the end:

Message from syslogd@nsb at Sun Mar 19 03:39:23 2006 ...
nsb kernel: journal commit I/O error

After that, the filesystem became read-only:

[root@nsb tmp]# cat /proc/mounts 
rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0
/dev/root / ext3 ro 0 0

which meant logging failed, inbound mail was lost or rejected, and all sorts of other badness.

There’s a fix for the read-only problem, but it didn’t work:

[root@nsb tmp]# mount -o remount,rw /
mount: block device /dev/md1 is write-protected, mounting read-only

The good news is that the Ops guys at the hosting facility transplanted the disk drives into a new host, allowing me to grab the files I didn’t have good backups of.

Anyway, if you read this after having searched Google for one of the error messages above, my advice is to make backups immediately, but be aware that they’ll probably be corrupt. Some component of your hardware is about to make an ugly exit, and it may take your data along for the ride.

Tags: hardware, failure, server, ram
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2006-03-22 08:11:19

After spending a year considering how easy it would be to add tags to this journal software, I spent about 90 minutes actually adding tags to this journal software. See taglinks below.

It’s a pretty basic implementation; the editing interface allows me to add any number of keywords to each journal item. At the moment, the tags are rendered as links to Technorati, allowing readers to discover other blogs covering the same topic. In a couple weeks, or, honestly, about 14 months, I’ll add a local tag-search feature that allows easy browsing of all items with a particular tag (or tags).

In terms of functionality, there’s a bit of a collision with the existing categorization scheme I’ve been using for years. But this is a classic case of ontology vs. folksonomy — of top-down, prescriptive categorization versus free-form, infinite-number-of-buckets tagging. Smart money says the latter is superior for organizing large corpora.

My old categorization scheme isn’t exclusive — every journal item could appear in multiple categories. Categories are tags, really, although in my case not very interesting or descriptive ones (e.g. auto, misc, travel). Who would go to Technorati, search for blogs about “auto,” and click through to debris.com? According to my server logs, exactly nobody, despite my creative and occasionally insightful writing about the automotive industry.

So I can imagine one day replacing my categorization system, which by the way took a couple days’ worth of coding, what with the nested and hierarchical display and fancy editing interface that I’ve used all of about seven times. Once I’ve built a browse-by-tag feature, the categories will be pretty much useless. Such is evolution… that long list of category links in the right column is basically a digital appendix. Or, maybe, a male nipple.

Why now? Why add tags when I’m not even writing that often?

A couple reasons: One, because I’d like to join the distributed community Derek Powazek spoke about at Etech. Tighter integration with Technorati is a solid first step. Two, because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the atomicity of information, and how to best collect and present many bits of related information in multiple contexts, and I needed more firsthand experience with tags. More on this later, but probably in another context.

Tags: tagging, technorati, community
posted to channel: Web
updated: 2006-03-21 08:06:11

I’ve been hosting my own websites since 1996, using a parade of hardware:

• Power Mac 6100 (October, 1996)
• IBM PS/2 486
• homebuilt AMD tower (April, 2000)
• near-silent 1.13 GHz Tualatin desktop (December, 2001)
• 1U rackmount P4 (July, 2003)
• leased 1U #1 (January, 2006)
• leased 1U #2 (March, 2006)

Why would I change out the hardware every 16 months on average? Because traffic growth demands increasingly powerful servers just to cope with the crushing load of your frantic clickthroughs? Sadly, no.

Because deep down I’m an inveterate hardware hacker and I really enjoy researching the latest hardware and assembling servers out of component parts? Urgh, not.

No, the reason is this: computers suck ass.

Of the six retired servers, only three were still running when they were replaced: the Mac, the PS/2 (which served another 5+ years as my firewall, and even now needs only a $3 ISA ethernet card and it could be back in production; the thing simply won’t die), and the Tualatin machine, which is even more silent sitting unplugged in my closet.

The white-box AMD tower stopped recognizing its SCSI card, so I had to junk it. The 1U I bought for $1800 lost a disk drive, and then another, and I decided that I’m done with hardware maintenance, so I moved the sites to a leased server, the idea being that someone else would have to fix broken disk drives.

Except that this time, the drives didn’t break… they just changed files randomly every couple weeks, until Saturday, when they changed a bunch all at once, and Sunday, when the OS declared that the entire filesystem would henceforth be read-only. What the fsck is up with that?

The ISP gave me a fresh 1U server to migrate all my services to, but this is scarcely an improvement over doing hardware maintenance. Who wants to spend a day recovering from backups and rebuilding server applications and testing? I think I don’t need a leased server so much as a managed one.

Tags: hardware, failure
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2006-03-20 17:30:36

Driving to the City Saturday morning, we caught a glimpse of Armageddon on 101N — peeking over the high guard rail, I saw what looked like about 100 cars strewn across four lanes of highway. I thought I saw a bulldozer, too, but that was probably a synaptic misfire brought on by the stress of carnage.

Equally shocking was that the highway was completely empty beyond the wreck — meaning, there weren’t 10,000 cars waiting for a lane to open. It was eerie. Highway 101 is never empty, especially not at 9:00 AM on a Saturday.

After passing through the Waldo tunnel, we saw the reason for the empty highway. Police were forcing everyone to exit 101N into Sausalito, at the bottom of the Waldo grade. 101N was closed! Another thing I’ve never seen.

Southbound traffic was moving quickly across the bridge. I asked the woman at the toll booth what radio station would broadcast traffic information, so I’d know when I could get home. She said “The CHP will have the road open by 5:00 PM.” 5:00 PM?! What kind of wreck takes all day to clear?

We heard the story an hour later: around 2:30 AM a driver had lost control and slammed into an SUV, killing the smaller car’s two passengers. [Insert SUV high-bumper rant here.] Because the road at the site of this accident is a steep downhill with blind turns, 26 more cars piled into first two. The CHP had been on site for something like seven hours already.

The Chron ran a full report on Sunday, with a better explanation for the initial crash: HUGE PILEUP IN SUDDEN BLIZZARD

More coverage: Marin Independent Journal (for 14 days only, hmph)

Tags: sfchronicle, trafficjam, carnage
posted to channel: Automotive
updated: 2006-03-18 08:31:34