Computer Catastrophe (Updated)

Sorry for the break, but my heretofore trusty Mac Mini froze up the other day, and nothing would fix it but wiping the disk clean and reinstalling everything. Unfortunately, I lost all of my iLife apps - iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Garage Band - and they were not on the disks the Mini came with (?!), so I had to finally order a disk set of those apps. I lost a HUGE iPhoto library... for... ever, but all of the good stuff was backed up on my SmugMug account, so really no great loss, and I managed to recover my vast iTunes library off of my 30GB video iPod using TinkerTool (whew). All of my other vital stuff is on a 250 GB external drive, so I got off pretty easy, considering. The disk checked out OK and repairing the permissions didn't help, so I'm not sure what the problem was.

UPDATE: I'm still having the Mini freeze on me (But not terminally, as was the case before), and I found out what the problem was when I stumbled across this thread in which a Mini user had the same kinds of freezes after installing new RAM. So, I ran the Hardware Test disk, and guess what? Yup, I have developed some bad memory addresses. I've been wanting to upgrade because I only have 512 MB anyway, but the Mini is a MAJOR PITA to get into. Well, I also found an online tutorial for that, so I'm going to order 1 GB worth of fresh RAM and get with the program (ProTools gives me memory warnings all the time, so I've needed to do this for a while now).

Anyway, no more posting until iLife gets here next week because I have nothing to manipulate photos with. Believe it, or not, I've never even opened up any of the other iLife apps - I know nothing about Garage Band other than that it has a silly name and takes up disk space - so I basically just paid $79.00 for iPhoto!

Why Apple includes iTunes with OS X but not iPhoto is beyond me, as it seems just as necessary, but whatever.

I'm planning to get a digital video camera to make YouTube clips of me performing anyway, so I suppose I'll need iMovie soon enough, and I have two other computers that need the iLife apps, so I guess I ought to have a disk of them. Reinstalling ProTools LE 7 was actually worth while, as I got an entirely new point upgrade, from 7.0.2 to 7.1.0 out of the deal for free (I actually ended up with two ProTools LE 7 disks when I bought the Digi 002 earlier this year), so that was nice.

Oh, I also ordered the all-new version of Encore, v5.0.3, and my initial impressions are very favorable (I ordered a disk, but they also gave me an instant download of the full version, which was very cool). It pretty much works as before, but it looks like an OS X native app now instead of something ported in from OS 9, and the on screen display is WYSIWYG! Far more attractive. The old maximum file size feature bug is now fixed, though I haven't tested that out yet. First thing I'll do is try to combine all four movements of Sonata One into a single file so that they play seamlessly as I intended.

Finally, since this post will push the last Sonata One post off the bottom of the page - and this is post 401 for MMM since May, 2005 - I put a sidebar section with links to all four of those posts in the blog template.



It's a rerun, but one of my favorites.