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Too Lazy For My Own Good
Sep. 3rd, 2023 06:27 pmSo I had a theory several years ago that it would be a nice thing to get myself a Spire Studio and use it to record simple tracks while sitting at my desk. I got the Spire Studio and I've used it a few times, but not nearly as often as I had hoped to, which is sort of par for the course. But I figured that Gretchen and Julie had gone out to Starved Rock for a turnaround trip today, so why not give it a try again?
My desk is, as usual, a mess, but I managed to clear space and find my iPad. The iPad was sadly pretty heavily discharged, but I managed to find enough plugs to plug it in to charge, along with the Spire Studio, which *also* has a built=in battery, but why not give it enough power to play with too? It had been a long time since I used the gear, but I eventually managed to get things set up, get levels set, and set out to do a quick bit of recording with the built-in microphone.
Now, the problem of recording with the Spire is that you pretty much have to get the whole track right in one take. This is not impossible. It is made more difficult when your contacts dry out and you can't read the next line of the song. But I can get past that.
Then I realized that maybe I should silence the computer. So I did that.
And then my brother-in-law, Jeff, called looking for Gretchen. But I wasn't recording when the phone went off, so it was ok.
I *was* recording when Gretchen texted me a few minutes later. Perhaps I should have silenced the phone too. But I figured I may as well finish the track anyway. And, yes, it turns out that the incoming text is clearly audible, but this is an experiment, so let's just give up and finish it.
It's been a long time since I used the Spire software on the iPad. And in order to use the mixing software on the iPad, I have to disconnect from the Spire and reconnect to the home Wi-fi. I spent a bit of time poking around and found nothing helpful, so I finally decided it was time to go ahead and render this mess and see what it sounded like on a different pair of speakers than those built into the iPad.
Oh, look! I can use the built-in effects in the Spire hardware to do a bit of aided cleanup on the mix. Except to get that to work, I have to disconnect the iPad from the Wi-fi and reconnect to the Spire hardware. So I do that and let the track render.
Now, all I have to do is get this 70 MB WAV file over to my Windows computer from my iPad. Ha, ha, ha.
A bit more research shows that I can set up a network shared folder on my computer, get the IP address for the computer, feed it to the iPad files app, log into the Windows machine, and then copy the file to the shared folder. I could probably get this to work with the Synology NAS as well, but this started to seem like more trouble than it was worth.
The track sounds, well, not terrible. Not really what I was hoping for, but not terrible.
A bit of Internet searching turns up the fact that the Spire Studio is now abandonware, which is somehow not a great surprise, so it's definitely a case of what I have is what I get for as long as it continues to work. I could, of course, improve the situation by plugging actual microphones into it.
Or I could just get up from my office chair and go down to the studio.
I'm thinking that going down to the studio is a better plan.
Maybe tomorrow.
My desk is, as usual, a mess, but I managed to clear space and find my iPad. The iPad was sadly pretty heavily discharged, but I managed to find enough plugs to plug it in to charge, along with the Spire Studio, which *also* has a built=in battery, but why not give it enough power to play with too? It had been a long time since I used the gear, but I eventually managed to get things set up, get levels set, and set out to do a quick bit of recording with the built-in microphone.
Now, the problem of recording with the Spire is that you pretty much have to get the whole track right in one take. This is not impossible. It is made more difficult when your contacts dry out and you can't read the next line of the song. But I can get past that.
Then I realized that maybe I should silence the computer. So I did that.
And then my brother-in-law, Jeff, called looking for Gretchen. But I wasn't recording when the phone went off, so it was ok.
I *was* recording when Gretchen texted me a few minutes later. Perhaps I should have silenced the phone too. But I figured I may as well finish the track anyway. And, yes, it turns out that the incoming text is clearly audible, but this is an experiment, so let's just give up and finish it.
It's been a long time since I used the Spire software on the iPad. And in order to use the mixing software on the iPad, I have to disconnect from the Spire and reconnect to the home Wi-fi. I spent a bit of time poking around and found nothing helpful, so I finally decided it was time to go ahead and render this mess and see what it sounded like on a different pair of speakers than those built into the iPad.
Oh, look! I can use the built-in effects in the Spire hardware to do a bit of aided cleanup on the mix. Except to get that to work, I have to disconnect the iPad from the Wi-fi and reconnect to the Spire hardware. So I do that and let the track render.
Now, all I have to do is get this 70 MB WAV file over to my Windows computer from my iPad. Ha, ha, ha.
A bit more research shows that I can set up a network shared folder on my computer, get the IP address for the computer, feed it to the iPad files app, log into the Windows machine, and then copy the file to the shared folder. I could probably get this to work with the Synology NAS as well, but this started to seem like more trouble than it was worth.
The track sounds, well, not terrible. Not really what I was hoping for, but not terrible.
A bit of Internet searching turns up the fact that the Spire Studio is now abandonware, which is somehow not a great surprise, so it's definitely a case of what I have is what I get for as long as it continues to work. I could, of course, improve the situation by plugging actual microphones into it.
Or I could just get up from my office chair and go down to the studio.
I'm thinking that going down to the studio is a better plan.
Maybe tomorrow.