just read the cubase manual looking for something about where data is stored (confirming what i've deduced as inescapable, really), and i'm not finding what i looked for, but i did just learn this for the first time.

this would have been useful to me a few weeks ago when i was trying to run 30 vst instruments hooked to separate midi files simultaneously. i ended up pulling the latency down to something ridiculous, and because there weren't any waves running it was a fine workaround, but had i just done this i wouldn't have had to go through the process of mixing out all the midi tracks separately and then cutting out all the silent parts......

all these years, and i had no idea. i will make generous use of this in the future.

Elliott Jang
Beethoven is a distant 2nd to Mozart in regards to composing

Alex Prendergast
Whew! Thank goodness that's settled!

Patera Milenko
No, you can't really compare the two. They are both brilliant beyond time.

deathtokoalas
bah. beethoven was a creative genius. mozart just knew how to follow all the stupid rules. the result is that beethoven has aged splendidly, while mozart just comes off as a conforming tool.

to put it another way: mozart is merely a period composer. beethoven is truly timeless.

MrEitinha
"You're a Mozart fan!" - Norman Stansfield

toni8675
Any simple comparison between the two of them is just plain childish. Mozart died way younger (and when he died, he already started composing more mature, experimented with chromatic harmony beyond others of his time, and added serious ployphony to his last symphonies), Beethoven lost his hearing, not to mention the 14 years between their births... No one knows how many more things Mozart would have accomplished had he lived as much as Beethoven. There are simply too many variables, that's why you just can't really compare the two of them...

deathtokoalas
it's a very easy comparison: beethoven is exciting, mozart is boring. i see no reason to think mozart would have gained a deeper sense of artistry had he lived longer. what he lacked wasn't age, but emotional attachment to his writing.

toni8675
If the requiem, symphony no. 40, the piano concerto no. 23 (adagio) etc. lack emotional attachment, then I'm curious what's your definition of attachement...

deathtokoalas
well, the comparison is to beethoven; pick something, little of what he did was schmaltzy (with the exception of this piece). but rachmaninov is the apex, specifically his 2nd and 3rd concertos.

almost all of mozart's pieces sound like solutions to engineering problems, those ones included. perfect? sure: perfectly trite.

i was able to reconstruct and authoritatively back up my archival material a lot easier than i thought i would be able to. the only thing i've lost of any consequence is a couple of backing files for 'ignorance is bliss'. i can live with that.

now that i'm a little more focused as to what i'm looking for, i'm going to do one more data recovery scan through the other two physical disks to see if i can salvage anything. i'm not overly confident.

as for the script? i did this once before and concluded the data was garbled, but if i can reconstruct the directory structure and file names of the script, and get a bit lucky in pulling out a few text fragments, i should be able to rebuild the script with minimal effort - even if it takes a few days to write it all out and do some virtual testing. well, shit, it could be a month before the bus pirate gets here, anyways.

i'm going to move some things around with the expectation of getting used to living with three discs for the time being. i'm not sure i could even buy a 250 gb sata II drive new anywhere (and second hand hard drives are a dumb idea). so i'm going to end up upgrading.

when i do, i'll move the music files to the new drive. they're both the most important and need the most space. that'll leave me with two 250s i can boot into 32 and 64 bit, respectively, and one to use for various types of backup.

for right now, though, i don't have the appetite to set up a 64 bit system. but i might end up at least nliting it, depending on how much time i end up waiting for, and how successfully i can salvage the other laptop.

as the problem with the other laptop is the hard drive (there's a pattern here; i'm tempted to go to ssd, i'll have to check prices), what i'll have to do is work off an external. then again, it hasn't actually died yet. in the long run, that's another component i'll have to replace, but it's not a priority.

so, i'm chugging away at this. i can't provide an eta for getting back to what i was doing, but i can at least report having a few ideas.

cmd files may technically be programs, but people interact with them like text. they're more like modern-day scripts, really.

in trying to salvage old files off my working drives (to replace the files on the trashed one), i've noticed that i'm often able to pull text files up that have been deleted for up to five years but i can't pull off cmd files that were deleted last month. it doesn't seem to be dependent on size. i'm led to conclude that ntfs is filing cmd files as programs and they're getting easily corrupted as binary.

but they're not really programs. they're certainly not binary they're text...

i realize that there may be some security issues with treating scripts as text files. but how serious an obstacle is this nowadays really? i mean, if you can launch notepad remotely, you're pretty much in control, are you not? even so, wouldn't it make more sense to block at the kernel than the file system? even backup drives crash. rather, this strikes me as an ancient windows artifact from the early 90s or the late 80s when cmd files really were programs and that should be updated for modern usage. i can't be the first person that's run into this.

i don't know enough about other file systems to comment.

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

the topic matter is considerably less intense, but i borrowed the drum loop (figuratively, not sampled) for the song of the day ("too cold").

(relevant tracks: too cold, ignorance is bliss)