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Filling the car

It makes me realise just how far we’ve come when I can get two 16 channel professional mixing desks in the back of my standard family car, plus a ton of posters, banners, cables, T-shirts, audio interfaces, computers, preamps etc. (and even a small hand cart!) and yet still travel in comfort and ease. Even a few years ago I would have been out hiring a truck for this.

This is why PreSonus stuff works the way it does: because we have to load it and carry it places too.

There’s a legend that James Watt designed the steam engine because he was too lazy to get up and take the kettle off the boil.  Never underestimate the power of laziness to motivate genius.

Cable ties

While packing up a bunch of stuff in cases today, it struck me that my single most used piece of PreSonus branded equipment is… the cable tie! We make these for promotional purposes really, but they’re one of those things that although small, cheap, and unassuming, has made a huge difference to my life. Finally I can actually find the cables I need, and not have to disentangle them from 17 other cables first. Yeah I know I should have figured this out 20 years ago, but better late than never, eh?

Velcro. It’s a wonderful thing.

Update on my previous Wi-fi woes: I found an old Linksys WUSB54G USB Wi-fi adapter laying in a drawer and plugged it into the studio Windows 7 box instead of the TP-Link PCI card. Win 7 found and loaded the driver automatically, and DPC Latency checker now reports a maximum latency of 331 microseconds. That’s not quite as good as the 74 microseconds with no Wi-fi, but a whole hell of a lot better than the 6000+ of the TP-Link card. Not only that, the Wi-fi signal is has gone from Poor with the TP-Link card to Good with the Linksys USB adapter..

So my conclusion is: TP-Link products appear to be cheap for a reason.

Packing for Producer Sessions

Am starting to pack up to go to the Future Music Producer Sessions in London. It’s actually still a week away, but I like to start getting stuff ready well in time. People don’t realise how much preparation work goes into making one of these shows work. The things that seem most obvious (like the computers and monitors etc.) are usually the last things to get packed since we’re usually working on those until the last minute, testing new beta software and hardware, preparing new demos songs, that kind of thing. First to get packed is usually stuff like banners, tablecloths, that sort of stuff, which seems very mundane, but without it the show would look pretty boring.

The other things I like to pack are the goodies: T-shirts, mouse pads, cable ties, all are in the box already. I enjoy being able to give away some stuff to our users – you guys pay my wages ultimately, the least I can do is give something back when I can!

Wi-fi horror…

Decided to buy a new Wi-fi card for my (Windows 7) studio computer. I managed to get a good deal on a TP-Link Wireless-N PCI card with an Atheros chipset – just a few bucks. Score! Got home, installed it, works great. Then I loaded up Studio One and set to work on the song I had been working on yesterday, and it sounded like I was frying eggs in the studio. Just completely impossible to work, loads of noise, jerky response from S1, everything was a mess.

Went to the Device Manager in Windows 7 and disabled the new Wi-fi card. Sure enough Studio One was now perfect again. Sigh.

I checked the system with DPC Latency Checker – without the Wi-fi card maximum latency was 72 microseconds. With the Wi-fi card enabled that shot up to over 6000! Anyone using Windows for digital audio really needs this tool… So I think I’m just going to  install Homeplug adaptors round the house instead in future and stick to using Ethernet, it’s so much more reliable.