Blog update

Hectic week, with a kidney ultrasound at the big city VA.  I was stressed to the gills over that, but the call-back from my VA doctor is Tuesday, which means nothing serious was found.  Otherwise, she'd have contacted me right away.  So I can relax a little.

Meanwhile, grass pollen is high, and my head is in agony.  And I've been working on a ton of tracks, following Ernie's suggestion that I post my favorite gospel sides.  Sounded great to me, so I've been ripping and editing and filtering.  And I've been having to redo my editing work each time MAGIX conks out, which is constantly.  At one point, it literally took nine or ten trips back to the drawing board for me to complete a single file.  I'd get it done, and MAGIX would sort of tremble slightly, the PC would clock, and then the display would blink out.  It would vanish, along with the work I did.  Then I'd try again. Then it would conk out.

Now, there's a new version of my program that's allegedly compatible with 10.  My MAGIX Cleaning Lab--the one I'm using--is pre-2015, so there's so guarantee it will work with 10--so I'm told on line.  And it clearly isn't, at least for now.  But is lack of compatability actually the the reason for the constant conking out?  It occurred to me that drive space could be the issue--my software was on the C drive, which has very limited room.  The D drive is way bigger.  So I went on line for instructions on how to move a program.  As is the case 99.9 percent of the time, the "how to" instructions didn't correspond to any options actually present on my Windows 10, so I went for the most obvious method, hoping it would work.

Namely, I simply cut and paste the MAGIX folder from C to D drive.  I did this on my "My PC" page.  For some reason, it didn't work.  Second try, it worked.  One of those things.  The two tries generated two side by side shortcuts to the same D drive program.  No biggie--paths are just paths.  One program, two paths side by side.  After several weeks coping with 10, two shortcut icons side by side seems rational.  In the days of the infinitely more rational Windows 7, I'd have deemed this unacceptable.  But my standards have dropped.

Anyway, with my MAGIX on the much bigger D drive, I was hoping for no more blink-outs.  At first, all was fine.  Then, today, one lost piece of work after another.  So, I'm thinking maybe I'll have to go with the latest Cleaning Lab, despite the company's stupid, "Let's be like everyone else" decision to make the waveform display smaller--the least sensible design decision possible for an audio editing program.  MAGIX's great virtue used to be its beautifully linear and eminently logical layout.  The antithesis of my Cleaning Lab is this crap music software I bought years back in which performing a single task requires jumping from spot to spot to spot on the page, in that fractured way far too much software is laid out these days.  Add to this mess help screens that don't even agree with themselves, and we've pinpointed the danger of trusting all our data to people whose brains aren't glued together.  

But my MAGIX lab was that rare software written by Earth people.  Now MAGIX is getting stupid, taking tips from inferior outfits.  Such a shame.  BUT... another idea came to me.  What if, during the program's move from the C to D drive, folders were lost or corrupted?  Unable to unearth the Control Panel from the cluttered mess that is Windows 10, I went on line--and for once, the instructions worked.  So I was able to get to the program in the list, click on it, and use the repair option.  So far, the repair seems to have worked.  Key phrase: So far.  At this point "so far" doesn't mean much, but I'm determined to keep this marvelous MAGIX program if at all possible.

If it should go through another round of blinking out, I'll either contact MAGIX or the Geek Squad.  Something is happening in the background to knock MAGIX out of commission, though the Task Manager doesn't make it clear what, if anything, is the culprit.  If I can find out what that activity is, I should be able to shut off that activity.  It will, in all probability, be something I don't want and didn't ask for.

Wish me luck.  Maybe a post tomorrow, maybe not.  I will NOT do an all-nighter.  I have a bad habit of sticking to something until I whip it, but my body needs sleep.  I think of sound-editing as my life, but I have to keep in mind that's not literally true.  If I were stranded in the desert without water or food, I wouldn't be asking for sound-editing software and a PC.

Lee