UGH

[kaixo]

Yesterday was one of those dreaded days.

I had to put my computer back to factory settings (it was lagging, things weren’t doing what they were supposed to do and just… stuff which only got pronounced when I started playing around with my audio wave files).

After going through, saving all my audio files (well, I thought), when I came back, all my podfics on GarageBand were gone. All gone. UGH.

Even though I’d saved them on my external hard drive or thought I did, I still couldn’t find them. I also saved other podfic that I’ve downloaded and aren’t mine, so I know I went through the act of saving things, I even made notes as to which files were what (because due to error -87 blah blah I couldn’t rename the files, which brought me down this dark road).

I also lost some language files I’ve been working on, and I can’t even be arsed to go UGH over those. Backups are on thumb drives somewhere, and I have some chicken scratch of notes I’ll get back to.

Pen and paper are the best technology, tbh. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Not feeling too happy, I went and looked at Dropbox and - the mp3 versions of my podfic are there. I automatically exported them as mp3s as soon as finished (yes, I know mp3s are lossy files and probably the devil’s work, but that’s the default, tbh. It’s fine. We will deal).

Huzzah. Now to download them and then put them on to my external hard drive). Yesterday wasn’t a day for podfic, because I had to spend all that day finishing up computer stuff from the day before (I thought it would have taken me a couple of hours at most? Hah!).

Then I had to wrestle with Anki, only to hit a wall (because the info on my phone and the info on my windows PC weren’t simpatico, I had to chose one version of study cards and both were deleted.

Since bravery sometimes can be, “Okay, I’ll try again tomorrow.” I called it a night and went to bed.

Technology! It works - until it doesn’t. Tried to download Chrome only to be told that there’s malware at the minute, so I’m hanging out in Safari right now, and all my bookmarks are gone. I’m groping like a groping thing.

Right.

Because I hate ending on a bad note, I won’t.

At least when I turned on GarageBand, this morning I was familiar enough to set up a new project the way I wanted to. In terms of tracks (I have three as default: one for main narration, one for fancy stuff like fades and music, and the other one for outtakes that I may or may not add to the final file when it comes to joining file regions).

And that took literally a couple of minutes instead of an half an hour of trial and error and self doubt. I even made a little riff of Mary Had a Little Lamb with fades, dual audio files running together and layered tracks. I’m confident to have a play around and actually improvise stuff, even if it’s rubbish.

So, that’s something.

Anyway! I am over my sulk, and hope to do at least ONE podfic today, before I go and wrestle with Anki again.

I still have some inventory to do re: my knit books/yarn which I neglected for a couple of days to focus on tech nonsense which seems to be beyond me half the time. Thank goodness for people generous enough to share their experiences on YouTube and in reddit forums.

Finally the computer bits are done, and hopefully I won’t have to deal with this again for a long time!

Things I do not live for: this.


^{Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow - Mary Radmacher}