h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Here I was, all set-up to convert to a TOTAL linux network here- I had worked-around access my windoze-only printers and scanners by installing VMWARE on monster (my newest and bestest computer), and I thought I had it licked. No such luck.

Because Creative Labs (who make the Soundblaster Live, several of which I've accumulated on the premise that they're the best card you can buy for recording & stuff short of getting one of those thousands-of-dollars "pro" cards with all the multi-channel dongles hanging out which allow you to plug-in your generic guitar/analog jacks straight from your instruments and/or mixers for live multitracking directly to digital.

My own set-up is to have 4 soundcards with one jack each for any given instrument, one of which has a 4-track analog recorder patched in (though you can only extract one channel at a time from the analog tape, if you want to maintain the track integrity- i.e. to avoid the pitfalls of the traditional "ping-ponging" mixing down of 3 tracks to one track to recover the 3 tracks you've just used- with resultant loss of control over the volume/effects/etc. of the tracks so "ping-ponged"). See, by feeding the tracks to be "ping-ponged" one at a time to the computer, you can keep each track separate, and hence that all-important control over all aspects of the track before you make the final mix-down. The old method of analog "ping-ponging" more or less made you do several "final" mixes on various tracks, which could end up screwing up everything you'd done to date and make you start over from scratch- or accept a product you're not really satisfied with....

Anywaze, after installing all this, and even installing openmosix which would allow me to simultaniously multitract via mosrun with each computer in the node acting as one channel in a multichannel setup (reduce disk noise, interference from playback whilst recording-something you HAVE to be able to do in order to do decent multitracking- etc.), I discovered that there are *issues* with the midi sequencer for the SBLive and Linux!

ARRRRRRGGGGH!

And it's because Creative Labs refuses to make drivers/utilities for the Linux operating system- whilst blithely churning out windblows drivers and tools by the score!

This blows goats! Seriously!

I NEED MY MIDI INTERFACE! I NEED TO BE ABLE TO FEED MY KEYBOARD SOUNDFONTS OFF MY DISK! Especially since when I was toying with it when I was still running winxp on George- my second-bestest machine- and uploaded the crappy default SBLive fonts to my keyboard, making the drumkit on it sound like someone beating on tin-pans! And the drum-kit feature of my keyboard was one of the things I was MOST counting on- since I LOATHE programming drum machines (even though I know some guys- like my cousin- who can actually program drum tracks that are indistinguishable from a real drummer)! I'd much rather just hit a few keys, get the sound and feel of a live drummer (since a human is actually banging the keys) without having to learn yet ANOTHER goat-damned programming language! SHEEESH!

So, although I've done this full of self-revulsion and disgust, I've installed windoze *only* on poor George! Monster still has his linux partition, and prolly always will, since I've found that the linux CD burning software is much more robust than the windoze burning apps. With windoze apps, I turn out as many coasters as viable CDROMS from the process- while I've had a 100% success rate with the linux tools.

I just want to barf over it, though.

I spent WEEKS getting together the multitracking tools for linux! COMPILING them, searching for dependency libraries for that, and then INSTALLING them! Nice tools, too, and FREE!!! But it's all shot-down by Creative-Labs tight-assed "we don't make no steeking linux drivers and tools!" attitude.

Bastards and bounders!

Grrrrr!

Hey, and windoze screen-savers aren't anywhere near as cool as X screensavers! So I gotta look at boring screensavers too!

*sigh*

Well, hopefully, some competent linux geek will resolve the midi problem, and I can FINALLY make windoze go away once and for all!