Own Self, Foot

[ateolf]

So I spent the whole day of yesterday breaking my multitrack recorder. First, I fixed something. I got the case open and removed the broken tip of the headphone plug from the jack. Great! While I had the case open, I thought I might fix up the wonky buttons. This then required pulling out a few more layers of circuit board from the case. Here's where I proceeded to fuck the everloving shit out of the whole thing. Turns out the buttons aren't what I thought with the metallic paint on the inside. They're just good ol' physical buttons (though with a flimsy and over-complicated and indirect mechanism to push the inner button). So all that work of separating everything was...pointless! And I had fixed the problem button before, so instead of "improving" the situation I made things a whole lot worse. For starters, getting the board lined up right once you've removed it (especially with the led lights getting moved around inside real easy, you can straighten them out but then when you turn the board over and get it lined up with the case, they bump against the case and get moved). The big rotary dial that's sort of the whole central control of the machine got completely jacked up. Doesn't work at all any more. It has a very tenuous connection with two parts, one attached to the case and one attached to the board and getting them back together is very precarious. After a while of getting it back together a few random buttons just fell off inside too. So, button-wise things are worse off but that's not even the start of it! I quickly realize things aren't great with this equipment so I'd better back up at least the song I'm currently in the middle of working on (Stevie Wonder cover). So I go through the tedious process of exporting the individual tracks to the fat partition so they can be pulled to my computer (for some reason the export process takes a very long time, always has but usually just do it with the master track, so exporting the current 16 used tracks took 16 times as long!). Well, when I finally get my computer hooked up, I get shit about the usb device I'm connected to is unrecognized and malfunctioned! Alright! So while I'm in there I fuck up the usb! I spend more time trying to get creative. I have a device to connect a hard drive directly to usb (from when I rescued my old computer when it died) but when I hooked it up, I just didn't see anything, I don't think the drive is formatted to work with an os that's not whatever its own internal bullshit is. There's a built-in cdw drive so I could export the tracks to a cd, good thinking. Well, I've never really even used that and the drive doesn't even open (not sure if my doing or it's been broken but whatever). I tried to hook up the old cdw drive from my defunct tower. I got an error about the hhd drive not being recognized but it was still there when I hooked the original drive back up (anyway, think hhd is referring to hard drive not cd drive). Well, then I'm sure I fucked up the fucking hard drive and then nothing is worth anything anymore. I pushed connections in harder a few times and then it worked again. I may try the cdw drive again, but first I wanna just do a straight audio backup of the tracks. It'll be obnoxious and time consuming (while doing it and later when trying to get the tracks to line up just right) but I can play each track one at a time and record it onto my computer. At the very least then my work won't be lost. Then I'll try the cdw drive again and if it works it works if it doesn't I at least have the tracks backed up in some version so if I destroy this thing even worse all won't be lost.

Comments

[ifjuly]

you are definitely not stupid. sorry this weekend's made you feel that way. love you.