The Light of Day

Antiquated software and other pains in the tush
KeithHandy posted in Old skool, Tools on March 3rd, 2007

[mood| frustrated]
(Lil’ nod to my LiveJournal era there.)

So anyways, I still sometimes use Cool Edit on my wheezy old Windows box. It does a few things my current software on the Mac doesn’t do, like snapping to sample-accurate cue points (stored in the actual wav files), locking clips together into “groups”, good quality noise removal, and a few other must-haves. Ultimately the goal is to wean myself off of it altogether, but today, part of that weaning process involved actually using it to export some mellotron samples.

Since other software seems to have no idea what cue points are, and I have cues in these samples to indicate where it would loop (a sacrilege if you’re a true mellotron snob), the idea was that I would just manually copy and paste the looped part until the sound grew to a healthy eight seconds. Since there are a total of 35 sampled notes each for mellotron brass, mellotron flute, and mellotron strings, and each one of these notes had approximately a half-dozen or so repeats of the “loop” region, my project file had a lot of little clips in it.

Now … computer programs keep track of numbers in variables, which point to some exact place in your RAM. Some types of variables can hold a larger range of numbers than other types, because they use more bytes. If you’re a programmer, and you use the wrong type of variable, it will greatly limit what the program can do. (I was addicted to a Tetris game on a PDA where my score kept flipping into the negatives, because the programmer didn’t have the foresight to use a variable that would have held a larger score.)

So somewhere within the tangle of spaghetti that is Cool Edit, there is an unnecessary limitation on the number of clips I can have in a project. Only the program doesn’t realize this, so it lets me go hogwild, without warning me or stopping me, until suddenly I realize the program is repeatedly crashing, and I can’t keep it open long enough to consolidate my work.

So basically … grrr.