Back to Better Than The Book Recording, nightmares fixing up a computer + updates on the JabunAudio newsletter!

Hello everyone and hope you've had a great week since the last blog post! It's been straight back into the deep of it for me this week, with some great stuff as well as some absolute nightmares of frustration, but overall a very positive turnaround for the week. That's it for an intro, let's get straight into the news!

Firstly, I'm super happy to announce that after almost a month away from it, I'm back to recording vocals for the new Better Than The Book album! As of yesterday, 6 out of 10 tracks all have their vocals recorded (apart from gang vocals on a few which I'll do later), and man oh man does it feel great to be singing again! 4 left and I'm aiming to have those done by the first blog post of July, which at this pace should be juuuust about doable. I just have to make sure not to burn myself out like last time, so I'll be progressing with caution, while giving it my all in front of the mic. I'll keep you updated with progress in the next blog post!

Next, while I only started recording vocals on Monday this week, all previous days were dedicated to fixing/setting up the new desktop computer I was gifted as mentioned in one of the previous blog posts, and man oh man was that quite the ordeal... Starting with some strange RAM readings (8GB installed, but only 3.5GB usable), after many hours of diagnostics with a computer expert friend over the phone, we figured out that one of the 4GB RAM sticks was busted and would need replacing. A bit of a bummer, but nothing too much to worry about, and thankfully the local CeX had the exact same RAM stick in stock to fill in the slot. Fixed! So then came the long but necessary task of installing all my programs and plug-ins, authorizing them where necessary and all that jazz, then bridging over the 32-bit plugins using the mysterious software jBridge (more on that in a moment). By Friday night, everything was pretty much set up and ready, apart from waiting for a full download of the jBridge software, then I hit the next roadblock. Up until now the computer was super speedy, but Windows decided it would be a great idea to install an upgrade without my permission. It spent almost an hour booting up only for me to be greeted with a sluggish and over-featured (none that I'd use, or could remove) OS which made my old Vista laptop feel like a race car compared to a snail (my vista's pretty speedy though). Waking up the next morning and it still running horribly, I decided to use the option to revert back to the previous OS which was running perfectly before. That took an hour just to tell me that it had failed, I wouldn't be able to boot Windows and that I'd have to reinstalling the OS at factory spec from scratch, loosing all the work I put into installing and authorizing everything over the past few days... I genuinely felt sick... Well... after a weekend filled repeating much of last week's work instead of what I had previously planned, I finally got it back to the state it was in before the upgrade, and now I'm permanently disconnecting it from the internet so it can't repeat the same mistake! By now I'd received the full version of the jBridge software too, and everything was working smoothly apart from one plugin. I got in contact with the developer, and I must say it was some of the best customer service I've ever experienced. They ran me through diagnosing it myself, tested it on their end and we eventually managed to fix it. All for a 15 Euro plug-in, I was highly impressed. If you ever need to bridge 32-bit plugins to a 64-bit host like I did, I highly recommend jBridge! Overall, despite the turbulent week setting it up, I now have a very reliable, speedy and higher spec machine to make music on, all ready for action! I look forward to putting to good use soon! 

Lastly this week, just a little update on the JabunAudio newsletter. It's just under two weeks until I send out the first one, and I've started writing up the first article as well as planning the next few. It's not the most glamorous topic, but I thought I'd start by covering the importance of metering in music and audio production, what meters there are, when you'll want use them, how to use them effectively and my suggestions for some free ones if you need them. I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to sharing that article with you in the first week of July! Stay tuned, and if you've yet to sign-up (it's free!) feel free to do so on the JabunAudio homepage, and receive a free PDF article download to get you started. Hope to see you there!

That's about it for this week! My coming week will likely be filled with Better Than The Book vocals as well as writing articles for the JabunAudio newsletter this weekend. Anything else that happens is a bonus! Anyways, thanks as always for supporting JabunAudio and my various projects and I hope you have a great week until the next blog post. Take care!