(Lack Of) Progress

So between me and the Engineer, we'd been trying to solve a little problem that cropped up while trying to record some movie music. For years now, I've been using a Yamaha SY85 sequencer to sequence the instrumental parts of my music since it uses samples to output sound and sounds really good. Well, for some reason, the sound outputs went out on this thing a few weeks ago, and now, only the MIDI outputs work. That's bad, but also good. The fact that we still have the MIDI outputs means there's hope for retrieving the volume of music I have recorded on this thing and have saved on a half dozen 3.5" floppy disks that only work in this device. I searched for an emulator, but no dice.

So, he and I turned to the programs that he has available on his Mac: Ableton Live, CuBase, and Garage Band. He got the MIDI signals, but the best we could do is record the input on ONE of them as a single combined track. That won't work. I came up with some ideas for his later, but let me finish this. We couldn't figure out how to get either CuBase or Garage Band to record the MIDI input in its entirety.

So I worked with it using some demos of Finale 2007 and Cakewalk SONAR Producer 7. Sonar did record it, but all on one track, and when I played it back, it didn't contain all the notes. I tried Finale, and it did the same thing. But with Finale, when I tried to run all the tracks (I am outputting as many as 8 at once), it wouldn't scribe anything. When I ran one at a time, it did work, but it wouldn't do all the notes, just like Cakewalk. I was flummoxed and frustrated after fooling with this for 8 hours on a Saturday.

What I wished for more than anything was the program that did work. Back in 1999, I was using an old computer that run Windows 98, and had a program that not only captured all the notes, but did it in one pass and separated it all into the separate tracks. I knew I had done this using an old version of Cakewalk, and I had another program called Midisoft Recording Session, written for Windows 3.1 and 95, as well. I dug through the garage for Midisoft and found me one broken CD. Dang it. I knew my old computer had Cakewalk on an 80 Gb drive I'd put on there just to store stuff, and at present, the boot drive had a broken version of Windows XP.

My solution was to reinstall Windows 98 on the boot drive, and see what I could gleen from the storage drive. Or that was the plan. I popped the original restore disk for this computer into the CD ROM. It gave me all the warning about it formatting the hard drive and and all info lost, yadda-yadda-yadda. Well, I'd done this before, and it always popped the OS on this 6Gb hard drive that I'd been abusing ever since I got my XP machine. So when the re-install was done, I watched it run a check disk and tell me...I have 78,000,000 Mb available. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Yeah, it wiped my 80Gb hard drive. In a move completely contrary to the machine's BIOS setup, it arbitraily decided that C: was now the 80Gb hard drive instead of the drive marked as its primary master drive, the 6Gb. Never in the life of this computer has the 6Gb been anything other than the primary master, but sure as it was done, it booted onto that broken XP drive. I had to dismantle the computer, move the jumper to the 80Gb to designate it as the master, redo the BIOS to detect it in a new capacity and ignore the 6Gb. I figured the info was gone, so I had to move forward. I was very, very angry, but there was nothing I could do at that point. I knew I should have disconnected the drive first, but no, I just let it run.

Anyway, I got it hooked back up and found Midisoft Recording Session online. Yeah, someone actually had a copy of the installation program stored online. The Internet is awesome. You can find anything. I installed it, hooked up my sequencer using the old cable that came with Midisoft to begin with, and pressed play. Before my eyes, every note on every track was actively scribed into the program. With two clicks, I separated the completed sequence onto 7 separate tracks.

So in the end, I lost a bunch of ideas and script versions as well as the first version of these files I had created and a mysterious version of Cakewalk that I haven't found yet that has a picture of Van Gogh's Scream for a stop button, but I was able to start pulling all those sequences of 15 years worth of music off that sequencer into a usable file format. I have mixed feelings about what all happened, but I'm very happy with the end result. Now, I just need the time to do it.