The last few months have been a bit of a write-off musically for me - I had to send off my MacBook Pro to get the keyboard replaced.
The number 7 key stopped working - you can't imagine how much that actually became a pain in the ass - the amount of times I had to click "7" in Calculator and then copy and paste into a document was surpisingly high.
Whilst my laptop was off being repaired, I was given a replacement one from work, and decided it was a great time to do a clean install of Snow Leopard and all my audio apps.
My updated Snow Leopard version of OSX on my old lappie was never quite right, even though I downloaded and used the Combo Updater rather than the ol' Software Update, and apart from just being generally sluggish it did some odd things at times - including some corrupted graphics in file menus that obscured the file list, and some other random audio oddnessess amongst other things.
As you can guess, installing everything from scratch turned out to be an extremely lengthy process, in the order of a few months, with having to install all my work applications as well as my own music ones, plus all my music libraries etc.
Suffice to say that I'm STILL opening songs and occasionally finding either sample/loop libraries or plug-ins missing and then having to track down the installers.
Part of the problem is finding out the actual name of the missing files - the error message that Logic gives you about plug-ins for example doesn't have the whole name, only a truncated version.
And missing custom-made Apple Loops - don't get me started on THAT!
I'm also now regretting all the freeware audio plug-ins I added over the past couple of years and then used only once in my new songs.
The trouble is, the songs don't sound quite the same without the missing plug-ins, so it's easy to become distracted trying to recover the original vibe.
Once I have the plug-in back I can usually find something else in the standard set that does the same job.
It's completely broken my flow as far as developing and finishing my songs off (although I have to admit it's not the only reason - teenage kids moving in have also been a big influence).
Now I finally have my old laptop back, I've spent yet another annoyingly long couple of days juggling files on hard drives (with never quite enough space) and imaging the new laptop's hard drive back on to my old laptop.
Of course even then it wasn't that simple - lots of my apps needed re-authorising since they were on a different computer - and only today have I managed to get more than a few of my songs finally running the way they used to.
But I'm finally there at last - it's fantastic having my old 17" screen back rather than the limited 13" on the replacement lappie (plus the extra USB and FireWire port).
I'm pretty excited - I finally had a day off without kids and with a mostly-fully-functioning computer that I could actually carry on doing some music with.
Time to get that ball rolling again.
