The Song is You

Thumbs up for victory!

- The Song Is You.mp3
You know how when you get a new toy and all you want to do is play with it?
Cool feeling isn't it?

Well this post has nothing to do with that. Sorry.
In fact, this post has more to do with old toys...the kind you've had for a long time, the ones that you clutched to your chest when first they were new.

Reaper. My beloved music editor. My wicked good taskmaster. my music technology mutha-fletcher.

I've been away. Reaper didn't come with me.

I was building things...with tools that i held in my hands, saws and drills, clamps and hammers, not virtual tools, no VSTI's. Although come to think of it, it might come in handy to have a virtual hammer; I'd much rather have clobbered my finger with a virtual hammer than the 22-ounce number i did do it with.

Anyway, i dove back in today, back into the glossy pages of computer music recording. it was no end of fun for me. and although i'm not sure if Reaper missed me as much as i, it, we did shake hands and come out fighting for the lion's share of this mid-january wednesday.

The tune that happened to be on the top of my music is the one i chose to break my fast: a Jerome Kern classic called "The Song is You." It's a good thing i chose this particular tune because it's level of complexity, while belying the amount of tweaking it took to round up and capture, was comparatively low. i still struggled.

patience and perseverance was the order of the day. the methodical plodding offered weird comfort. although not exactly enjoyable, it was at least familiar. Moving from roadblock to stupefying barriers, virtual rampart to real frustrations, i lumbered through these like a drunken giant returning from his nightly pillage. it was inexorable. i burned through an entire day.

but in the end, i got it down. Quality? Questionable.

but in the end, i got it down.

Modern Technology teaches Old Dog How to Play Dead

This post is a continuation of the previous hair-pulling extravaganza.

So there i was, at the end of a day that started out in quiet contemplation and peace and ended...well it hadn't ended yet.
This is what happened:

I was searching for a way to add the fruits of my labor--that is to say the tracks of the Chet Baker tunes I was working on to lay down to use to practice the various musical skills and sensibilities, to manifest the sounds and emotions i hear and feel when listening to and/or imagining Chet's music.

i needed to post audio to my blog.
so i set out to do just that. it turned out to be an exercise in computer technology.

if my knowledge and expertise about this sleek little white box on my lap was pudding, you'd be really pissed off if your momma gave you a bowl of it and called it dessert.

However.

I nonetheless plunged in head first. intrepid warrior that i am.

Embedding audio in a blog can go one of two ways apparently: you can stream it in or you can point the blog to another site that is hosting it. neither of these things i understand.

even if i did, it turns out that some of the sites that profess to get the job done, fall way short of delivering. this can be upsetting to the user with barely enough know-how to craft a query to use to find what they seek.

in fact, i have to say that this one thing, knowing what to ask, how and where to ask it (i guess that's three things) is a veritable trifecta in triumph. if it works. which it didn't.

So i looked on Blogger's site, Tumblr's site and Wordpress's site for answers to questions like:

'How to add audio to blogs' (seemed to me a pretty accurate statement for what i needed...turns out not)

'Add audio files' (another dud)

'Blogger audio post' (this one produced results in a nice array of rabbit holes that provided hours of amusement)

I tried many more of course but none knocked it out of the park.

Chasing down a search element is something like chasing your tail. Course i don't know for sure, not having one myself. And come to think of it, i can't really say that because of the fact that our dog used to chase his own tail; 'cept he would actually catch it. no one was more surprised then he was.

Unlike my puppy dog, i intended to catch my own tail. Trouble is, as i proceeded on my search i seem to be getting farther and farther from my original goal. this was a curious phenomenon. what was happening i think was that with each fruitless search, i'd widen the net more and more until the results would be just random bullshit.

My blind thoughts were leading my blind search. result? more blindness and less hours till dinner.

It wasn't all a vast wasteland of ignorant prodding about though. i stayed remarkably calm and tried to think of other ways to ask the question.

Some hits would offer a solution, and i'd follow it through, downloading what it said to download, type in what it said to type in, act like it said to act. only to find out at the end of it the sad truth:

It didn't work because:

it wasn't a program originally written for Mac OS
or
it was a program written for Macs but it just plain didn't fucking work
or
it works on Macs but not on the latest version of the OS
or
it works but you can only upload files in a certain oddball format
or
it works but only on Safari, not on Firefox. (this one was my personal favorite; it was the last and biggest time-invested failure of the day and of course it took place 6 hours into it)

That said, i'd have to say that aside from the platform problems and the browser sensitivity the thing that really toasted my tips was the log-in failures.

I can see how my ignorance would preclude any hopes for immediate success but when you find a site that hosts audio and the code works on your blog site and all the other ducks are in their proper rows, it should be game over: put the horses in the wagon, cuz it's all downhill from here.

but no.

I successfully posted an audio to the blog but when i went back to the host site to upload another, i couldn't log on. it didn't recognize me. even after asking for a different password (why the fuck do i need a password anyway, it's not like it's a banking site) i kept getting that irritating message:

PASSWORD DOES NOT MATCH OUR RECORDS; PLEASE TRY AGAIN


This message is second only to other, equally annoying ones. Messages like:

'File does not exist'
and
'No suitable plugins found to play this file'

I was still pretty calm.

I was introduced to the concept of CODE. Oh goodie.



First of all they don't call it 'code' for nothing. This stuff might as well be written in Cuniform characters. what is with all this mumbo jumbo <`~> vch/false/bullshit. I mean really. Like the sign says:

Speak American!

I love this code stuff though. once i got past the urge to kill, i found it sorta charming, the way if you just left off one of those curly cues, there wouldn't be a play button, or the file would all of a sudden be a photograph instead of an audio file for the interface would show up in size 50 font or the window would disappear altogether. Cool in a kind of sideways sadistic way.

Then i hooked up with a site called zShare. I don't remember how i got it. a random hit, a forum. who knows. i'm glad i did cuz it did the trick.

But i had to be resourceful to get the thing to do what i wanted it to do: post a specific audio file to a specific post. in other words i needed "I Remember You' a tune that Chet recorded and that i covered, to post alongside the written post about the recording "I Remember You.' Simple right?

I thought so.

But then again, i wasn't hip to all this computer language stuff. not that i am now mind you. i'm just celebrating the fact that i was able to design a protocol all by myself that got my audio files shoulder-to-shoulder with their post-partners. Hooray for me.

How did i do it?

In the next post you will find a step-by-step knuckleheaded procedure especially designed by and for all you backyard mechanics so you too can marry your posts with their betrothed.