It's really a shame that Fishbone's Party at Ground Zero, which predates 9/11, has the words "Ground Zero" in it, because in all other ways it's ideal goofy-dancing-with-toddlers music.

I just discovered, through Doug Wyatt's journal, that one of my longtime musical heroes has a new blog.

I've got music composed for something like five discontiguous minutes of I LOVE YOU, I'M SORRY, AND I'LL NEVER DO IT AGAIN. The total running time of the film is 15 minutes. So far, I've got the opening music sort of semisolid, the industrial/fingersnap/jazz first verse and industrial/holiday-for-strings (trust me, it works) first choreography very solid, and Kathleen's final mini-aria pretty close. I think this is going to be a great film.

The most irritatingly time-consuming part of this process is constantly having to "freeze tracks" in Digital Performer, because the 1GHz G4 Powerbook--which was plenty fast when I was cutting HD in Final Cut at Starbucks--can't handle 20 tracks of East/West Quantum Library String Orchestra, even with a 7200rpm external drive. So I've broken the orchestra into choirs (strings, brass, percussion, woodwinds, one Kontakt iteration for each) and I'm laboriously freezing, unfreezing, altering, freezing, unfreezing... and don't get me started on how often the freezes fail because the CPU can't keep up and I have to go looking for what OTHER track I can remove an output assignment from.

Wouldn't it make sense if freezes weren't just quick ways of routing a bounce to disk? The whole point is to get glitch-free playback after you've frozen. Does it make any sense at all to simply mute the other tracks (the ones you're not freezing), but still allow them to insist on processor cycles?

Yes, it does. But only from a marketing standpoint. Now MotU can say "We have a freeze-tracks feature!" But from a usability standpoint: GAH!

Foray into geekland over.

This is funny.



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