Aman Amun

So I decided it was time for an upgrade.

To be frank, my last show (up in New York) was nothing short of a technical catastrophe.  I had 30 minutes to set up an entire live recording and sound processing setup, a projection interface, and a lighting rig, a task which took me more than 3 hours including calibration and testing for my first show in Athens.  I ended up having to abandon my projection interface and lighting because of certai

n issues relating to the venue’s projecters.  I successfully set everything up in time but didn’t have time to calibrate and test everything.  In short, this caused some instability which resulted in, among other issues, ableton live crashing.  Twice.

After the second one I was about ready to admit defeat until someone in the audience suggested I just play the rest of the set Acoustic.  I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me before.  Almost all the songs start out t

hat way and get most of their practice in that format.  In the end I developed a healthy appreciation for the fact that everything went wrong.  Its impossible that more could go wrong than that and everything still turned out alright.

So like any persistent soul who is unwilling to admit defeat in the face of self-inflicted adversity, I trekked on

and started drawing up plans for how to solve some of the inherent problems to the complexity of what I do.  Step 1, get a new brain.

Some might suggest it a stupid move to get a non-apple computer running OSX.  Others would suggest it was a stupid move to buy a Hackintosh rather build my own.  I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with either of you, but I definitely don’t have the time to build a rack mount Hackintosh that I can be sure will work, and I definitely don’t have the cash to buy the equivalent rack mount mac (which would set me back roughly $2000 more).  And so I threw down pretty much all the gold I mined at Frog Design this summer and bought the best and cheapest machine that runs OS X that I could.  My new brain.

I’m could spare you the bloody details, but I won’t.  I bet there are a couple people out there who might be curious about what my purchase experience was like and how the machine stands up to my standards.  So here we go:

1. It took roughly 2 weeks (15 days actually) from my order to when it arrived at my parents house.  I forgot that they had to build it custom for me so I called them sometime in the middle and they were friendly and told me it was in testing.

2. The packaging itself was alright, but the out of the box experience itself was terrible.  All they really provide is a document with five pages stapled together.  Its badly printed in black and white on basic printing paper and labeled  “Setting Up Your Open/OpenPro Computer.”  Considering that the machine I bought was their “Rackmount Open(7)” model, the attached pages with basic labeled pictures of their Open Computer were pretty much irrelevant.  The last page “Connecting Your Computer” is full of relevant information, but it hardly touches on the big questions which I had about where to start.  I assumed that OS X was already installed and so I booted the machine up.

More coming in another entry….