Fuck everything about last week. A Pyrrhic victory over my task manager, redlining leading to unhappiness leading to more redlining. But I managed to unwind this weekend. Took a deep breath, said hard no's to some people, and let go of the high expectations I had of myself. This week's been going great and my long weekend starts with a national holiday tomorrow. Time to play with the NI M32 I got myself, to keep up with the new daily piano practice the GF and I are doing, keep running (7th week in a row of 3x per week!). And, best of all, start working on the next version of my academic paper, which has not been rejected but has received 3 thorough peer reviews. I have until the end of June to fix their comments and am one big step closer to being able to call myself Scientist.
After 5 weeks of daily troubleshooting, in which I have updated every firmware bit, every driver, and the BIOS, in which I have spent four hours on the phone, in which I have purchased USB hubs, I have been told that I am now allowed to send my M32 back, at which point they will sit on it for five weeks, and if they can't find anything wrong, they will send it back because fuck you, that's why. Meanwhile it appears that the only way to access the ADAT outs on my presonus interface is through their janky software which turns everything mono. So I can hit it with Youtube (in mono) but not with Pro Tools. Depending on its mood I get a mono signal at "DAW 4" or "DAW 7" or "DAW 2" or "DAW 5" but when you actually fire up a DAW, Presonus has no idea what it is or why. I was told by Mike Bombich at CCC yesterday that the reason I have one failure out of two of two identical tasks of two near-identical partitions on one macbook to two identical Sandisk thumb drives is because, well, Sandisk is bullshit and sometimes shit's broke. On the plus side Izotope took pity on me for the fact that I had three accounts with scattered licenses and gave me such a phat discount on everything that I now own literally every plugin Izotope makes. I really wish I could get shit to work. I've even got 40 faders of EuCon talking to a laptop. I've got frickin' 16 outputs of Maschine onto 16 stereo tracks. I could actually be doing something.