Don’t take that tone with me

I hate to say it, but I completely regret upgrading to Snow Leopard on my main web development laptop. The issues have been pretty horrendous. The issues are so bad, I will either have to downgrade to Leopard or put certain programs on an older machine so I can still use them.

First, Fireworks no longer opens. This is a complete drag, as I use it for alpha transparency in png8 files. It’s a great trick that only Fireworks does (to my knowledge), but now I can’t use it.

If you double-click an .ai file to open the program, Illustrator always crashes. You can work around this by opening Illustrator first and them double clicking the file, but what a pain in the butt.

And now I’ve discovered a new issue. In Flash, many of my fonts are not recognized. I have an xml-driven site I’m developing, and Flash no longer can find an outline of the font I’m using. Therefore, the text no longer displays. So I either downgrade or start over on a client’s site. Arrrrggg!

The upgrade also has caused problems with Microsoft Word (albeit a very old version – Word:Mac version X… but one that was completely working). Old documents will not print. Oh it goes through the motions, but only a blank sheet comes out of the printer. Saving to PDF is also a problem. Once again, it goes through the motions, but sometimes the file just doesn’t show up. If I pull the .doc into Pages (Apple’s word processor), the layout is jacked to the high heavens. That never used to occur.

After quite a bit of reading on the Apple forums, it looks like I’m not the only one having major issues with Apple’s new operating system. It looks like maybe Snow Leopard doesn’t support Postscript Type 1 fonts. You gotta be kidding me. So now we designers might have to repurchase all of our older fonts? This blows.

Apple, you are better than this. Why did you have to go and pull a Vista on us?

On with my thoughts on the Eddie Kramer Experience (after a terribly long hiatus!). So Eddie (or Waves) wouldn’t answer my questions. Frustrating. It kinda seemed like Eddie wanted to talk about it, but the Waves guy clearly vetoed it. So I left feeling empty-handed and kinda cheated.

In hindsight, I should have stopped and talked to Eddie after the event. Perhaps he would have divulged more privately, as he really seemed to be pretty nice. Live and learn.

The next day I called a buddy of mine who used to work at Electric Lady Studios in NY. He had the pleasure of working with Eddie. He said everything was coming from tape into a Neve 1073EQ. Guitars hit an 1176… and sometimes two of them. He uses the SSL 2-buss comp on drums (and a host of other things).
I also figure there’s an LA2A in there on vocals, or maybe a fairchild. Pretty standard stuff (that is, if you have them!). For effects, tape delay is king. 7.5ips or 15ips.

Eddie did share a story about the recently released 40th Anniversary of Woodstock recordings (which he called 3 days of peace, music and hell). Carlos Santana and his band were told they were going to go on at 8pm. So the band dropped acid… only to find out they actually went on at 3pm. So Santana hit the stage completely wasted. On one of the songs, he was so lost and out of tune during the intro that the track was completely unusable. Therefore, it never made it into any of the originally released recordings from the event.

So 40 years later, Eddie has Santana come in and rerecord the intro. Eddie raved about how wonderful it was that we can now hear this historic recording. Hmmmm. While I completely understand the nature of our business and its demand for perfection, it’s tragic that a great live recording like this isn’t really the truth. Then again, I never enjoy having one of my mistakes documented for all time (they are too numerous to mention).

While I was working on Cary Bank’s (of The Maines Brothers fame) record Long Time Since It Rained, he said something I will never forget. “A modern recording is a documentation of an event that never happened.” Wow. There’s a lot of depth in that statement. I’m guilty of it too. We work so hard to edit a recording to perfection that many times we lose the magic (and mistakes) of a live performance.