Surrounded by all the bits and pieces now. Now I just need to pick them all up and put them all back together again.

Got a good deal on ACID Pro 7 yesterday, surprisingly so.  I had used it from very early Jan 2002 until March of that year, when I switched over to the little white Apple iBook (I’ve stuck with the Mac for audio ever since).  But with my beloved, trusty old 2007-vintage iMac starting to fail, and my only laptop of the moment this Win7 machine, I decided to see how much ACID had changed since back then.

It can record audio tracks now, it couldn’t then– a big part of why I abandoned it I think.  The MIDI tracking was slow on the hardware of the day, too (WinXP audio/MIDI had always been a little flaky for me, another reason I switched over).  I haven’t tried recording any guitar tracks with this setup yet, or importing/playing with any vox samples.  Maybe next week.

I did manage to preserve some archives from that time, so I have this very odd feeling of picking up exactly where I left off a little over ten years ago.  Like unlocking a long-abandoned office, to find your old abandoned desk with your old abandoned pen still sitting, undisturbed, on your old, abandoned pad of paper, exactly as you had left them.  Patiently waiting for you to come back and finish.

To its credit, ACID can still open files from so many versions past.  And I found… Drums. Weird Processed Drums. Lots of Weird Processed Drums.  (And I had gotten a little farther with the program than I had remembered).  Also found the Masters for two pieces from that era that I might end up reworking.  (Or at least taking apart, so I can remember how I made them).

I can’t find anything recorded in ACID (or on the PC at all) after early February 2002, so I really did just abruptly stop working on the PC for some reason.  Got the iBook in March 2002, so I was using the then-new Ableton Live before too long, anyway (late June or early July).  I do know that by mid-summer, I had given up trying to work with Drums altogether, and had moved over to pulses, noises, effects and drones.

But that’s another story.