For months I’ve been accumulating the parts for a PC based home recording studio.   Before I started I posted questions to my LUG and did hours of research on google.   It’s a one GHz Athlon system with a GB of RAM, a 4.3 GB hard drive for the Operating System, a 120 GB hard drive for data storage (audio tracks) and an M-Audio Delta 44 sound card.   The case, power supply and sound card are new, the used hard drives came from eBay and the motherboard, CPU with heatsink/fan assembly and RAM, also used, were a gift from a friend.

This is the culmination of a dream that began in 1979 when I met a fellow from San Antonio, Texas who, with a four track reel-to-reel machine, had created dozens of hours of original music.   He wrote the songs, sang them, sang the harmonies, and even played all the instruments on the recordings.   I wanted one of those machines in the worst imaginable way but they were expensive.   I had a child to raise, a mortgage, and a car payment so the dream had to be deferred.   A few years later a friend of mine who ran a small recording studio gave me a four-track machine that had a few minor problems.   Another friend took it to a service shop for me and brought back the claim check.   I called the shop about a week later to check up on it and got no answer.   I called again and again over the next few weeks and never once got an answer.   Eventually, months later, I heard that the company had suddenly locked the doors and filed bankruptcy.   So the dream had to be deferred again.   About two years later I got a call from an attorney but the numbers on the claim check that was still in my wallet had faded and become unreadable.   I didn’t have any other evidence of ownership so the dream finally died.

Fast forward to 2006 when I was a total newbie trying to learn Linux, learning a great deal about hardware in the process and then I discovered software like Audacity and Ardour.   It wasn’t a dark and stormy night and I had no thought of gnarled minions named Igor but that dusty old dream raised its head, shook itself off, and quietly came alive again.   Today I made the final connections from the case to the motherboard, opened the CD drive with a straightened paperclip, dropped in a freshly burned copy of 64Studio (which cost me nothing), gently closed the drive, connected keyboard, mouse, monitor, internet, AC cord and, finally, "fired it up".   A minute or so later the installation crashed.   I tried again, it crashed again.   The error message said something about an updated library that couldn’t be uploaded.   I mulled that over for a while and decided that there must be some conflict with a package list it was downloading from the repository via the web so I unplugged the internet cable and tried it again.   The installation proceeded without a hitch or a glitch.   About an hour later I was looking at a very attractive desktop and feeling incredibly intimidated.   Oh sure, all the software has learning curves but there are great tutorials all over the web.   Learning the software won’t be a problem but there’s a little Peter Lorre voice inside me whispering that it won’t work, something will go wrong.   What will I do if something goes wrong?   What will I do if nothing goes wrong?

Don Crowder

This important message was brought to you by my Debian Sarge Computer.