Computer Hell

So, what’s this got to do with us audio folks? Mark Parsons of Parsons Audio (Wellesley, MA), my local pro audio sales person (and yes, I’ve been known to buy him fine hooch on occasion), who has helped numerous clients (including me) through moments of severe difficulty, has written the following:

“Everyone who has used computers has experienced certain unromantic adventures that might be called Computer Hell: crashes, freezes, anomalies, bugs, unexplained phenomena, undocumented features, points of fright, workaround mazes, realms of confusion, like dealing with unhappiness of any kind, unrequited love, pain, discomfort, disease, death, the monthly bills, an uncertain future, careening change, the madness within us all, heartbreak that dashes one’s fondest hopes and dreams. A hell as certain as change, mortality, and the end of life as we know it.

“If you work with machines, something will wear out, fail, or otherwise break. If that machine is a computer and depends upon software, so much more complex may be the puzzle that faces you, so much more wracking may be your pain, so much more overwhelming may be your despair, frustration, and anger. You may become an inhabitant of Computer Hell. All with the client watching!

“As Dante said ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’”

Mark’s soliloquy is aimed directly at you. He sees it first hand all the time. Software problems can make working with computers hell, and there is no way to put it politely.

The Computer As Musical Instrument

Making music is not easy, and musical instruments usually take centuries to evolve to the point where they play really well. The guitar is approximately 600 years old, the piano 300. Hell, the synthesizer is approaching 100, and it is still an undeveloped, clumsy, pimply adolescent! The personal computer is approximately 20, and in technological history it is still, well, an incontinent infant!

When we try to make this infantile machine function as a musical instrument, we are taking on a lot. While it has fabulous potential and like an idiot savant tantalizes us with promises of musical capabilities that we would all cheerfully die for, it is far from ready for prime time, or even bush league play.

The hardware is not built for musicians. It is General Purpose stuff, built for EveryPerson, for office cubicles and home desks. Using it in the recording studio or on the concert stage is like putting a goldfish in salt water: while it oughtta be able to swim just fine, in fact it goes into paroxysms and gives every indication that it is about to die!

Meanwhile, keep in mind that the software for all of the various tools in our virtual WonderTool SXT-9® is written by competing neurotics! Even the operating systems are loony! Windows doesn’t work with DOS. Mac System 7 sometimes doesn’t even work with itself! Softwares are often incompatible and so I find can’t run CDTools and Word together, f’rinstance. I had to throw out stuff to get my Digidesign software to work. And there’s no incentive for the publishers to make things any better. No skin off their noses if they screw up WonderTool SXT-9® for other uses. There’s no law against it, and anyway, they can’t be responsible for every dorky program that someone else writes, right?

The result is that although we buy WonderTool SXT-9® to take care of all our needs it doesn’t work, because the various functions conflict. Not only can’t we have the 32 promised different pliers on demand, most of ‘em make it impossible for the hammer capability to boot up, and as for the sexual enhancement function, well, that’s incompatible with just about everything else, because it uses an INIT that morphs the operating system, if you know what I mean.

This is all getting worse, by the way. Ten years ago, memory constraints kept both the computer functions and problems pretty modest, and so the houses of cards we could erect with our WonderTool SXT-3® were limited. Those modest houses are now exploding into veritable castles of cards that have all the stability of Tinker Toys in a tornado. The whole software structure in personal computers today is pretty shaky.

And to loop this back to the very beginning, when you get WonderTool SXT-9® up and running, the Special Instruction Set (including all those stupid INITs, CDEVs, ReadMe files, and Tips in the trade mags) has become huge! It is beyond any of us except true computer geeks. When you gotta execute 37 different Special Instructions just to get Hammer #9 ready to use and when you don’t do ‘em just right, you lose the well-driller and the tax-reduction package while the operating system crashes as well, the tool has begun to lose its value. And this happens a lot with personal computers today, particularly when we use them for specialty operations like music production.

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