Patti and I went to Thanksgiving at her nephew’s house. None of her older sisters were there, so the day was incident free. The only thing I avoided eating was the stuffing because of the wheat. Patti made it from a mix and said I wasn’t missing much. The new baby is walking around now and can say a few things. His parents usually must prompt him because he gets shy around people he doesn’t see often. We brought most of the food home with us because no one really wanted it. Patti is still working on finishing the leftovers.
I used part of my four days off from Thanksgiving to get my ADAT machine working. The last time I worked on it, the tape (which was basically VCR cassette tapes) was stopping with an error code 9. I knew I was going to have to open the machine to see which of the transport parts was not working correctly. After unscrewing 13 screws on the top of the machine, I realized it was the bottom that I needed to see. 13 more screws later, and I was looking at the underside of the tape playing mechanism. I saw the belt that was off one wheel right away.
I slid the belt back in place and wondered if I should test it before I put the screws back in. I thought it must be that belt that was the problem. Putting all 26 of the screws back, I pressed play on the machine. It played and I could see the audio meters rising and falling for each of the 8 tracks on the machine. This only reminded me that I still hadn’t figured out how to get the computer to hear the tracks. My focus was on getting the tape to play. I worked with it for a bit, and error code 9 came up again. I had to give up on it for that day. Time and my patience had run out.
On another day, I opened the bottom of the machine again and saw that the belt was still in place. I could see that it slid down from where I put it back on the wheel. I thought of putting the machine upside down so the belt had nowhere to fall, but then I thought that might screw up more things. My next brilliant idea was putting it on its side. I’d seen tapes you put in the machine on their side, so I tried it. It worked … for a little bit. The error code came up, and the tape stopped. Eventually, I figured out how to trick it into working, but I still wasn’t seeing audio on the computer.
The cables I was using to connect the audio interface with the computer were not doing what I thought they should do. I don’t know what those cables were for, but they weren’t for transferring audio to the computer. Perhaps they were only for syncing more than one machine to another. I only had one machine. In the end, I had to order audio cables to put each of the tracks directly into the computer. I focused too much on trying to get digital audio directly into the computer. The audio interface I bought had XLR connections, while the ADAT machine had regular audio cables out.
If you made it to this last paragraph, you are either an audio nerd like me or you skipped the nerdy paragraphs. It wasn’t a traditional Thanksgiving holiday, but traditions need to be updated. It is boring to spend every holiday doing the same things. Some may say that my nerdy audio discussion was boring. If you like simple discussions and easy holidays, then I think you may be boring. I better end this article before I start an argument with the reader. Perhaps I will talk about weird restroom habits in my next Thoughts from Life. You never know.
Thoughts from Life 
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