Saturday, January 20, 2018

2018-01-20

In "First World problems" news, it seems my PlayStation 3 no longer wants to boot up. Sounds like internal dust might be the problem, so I suppose I'll have to open it up and try cleaning it; if that doesn't work, though, I doubt I'll be replacing it anytime soon, having just dropped several hundred bucks on a 2TB SSD for the MacBook Pro. (I did say "first world problems...")

That solid-state drive was well worth the money, though. It's double the capacity of the laptop's original hard disk, it's faster, and it's quiet. I've got the room to drag all the files that have been relegated to CD-ROMs and external FireWire disks over the years back to my computer, so everything's in one place again, and I've still got enough capacity to give the operating system partition plenty of space to grow as I add applications and upgrade the macOS. Which I took the opportunity and did, so now I'm on High Sierra, and I'm pleased to say that every app I use on a regular basis is working fine in the new OS, even the old version of VueScan that I need to connect my even older (ancient by tech standards) UMAX Astra 6450 FireWire scanner to the MBP.

As of Sierra, though, my slightly-less-ancient M-Audio Ozonic MIDI keyboard controller / audio interface is useless. Specifically, there isn't an available driver anymore to make it play nice with the modern OSes, which sucks, because there don't really seem to be any new devices out there that check off both boxes (MIDI controller and audio interface). Well, this iRig Pro Duo from IK Multimedia looks like it would probably allow me to run the MIDI output from the keyboard to my laptop, while also functioning as its own audio interface, so that's probably the route I'll go (no need or desire to replace the keyboard itself), but again, I'm not planning on spending any more money on tech in the near future. I still have a bootable drive with Yosemite (or is it El Capitan?) if I find myself needing MIDI in the meantime. "MIDI in the Meantime" might make a nice title for an electronic song...

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