Day: September 24, 2007

Months ago, Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails fame) released his Year Zero album (which is a pretty great album).

Along with this, he released the multitrack audio files for each songs so fans could remix them at will. Multitracks: Well, in a regular song, there may be a track for vocals, a track for guitar, a track for bass guitar, a track for drums, etc. With Nine Inch Nails, there may be up to twenty tracks going into a song. In an unprecendented move, he released all the tracks for fan to rip apart and put back together in a new form (otherwise known as remixing).

Anyhow, a fansite 9inchnails.net went ahead and opened up a contest to build remixes and the results are compiled in a release called The Limitless Potential, a 2 CD set with 21 tracks which are remixed from all open-source multitrack files. 99% of them are from Year Zero but there are a few from their With Teeth album.

I’m listening to this album and so far it’s really, really good (if you like remixes). NIN is notorious for releasing remix albums for all their albums (usually making their own or having others perform a new mix) and if they were smart, I think they should look to the fans remixes for an official release. I am intrigued with some of the creations out there and would like to try my hand at a few of my own using Garageband.

Anyhow, if you are a fan of NIN, I highly recommend you head out and download this album. It’s download only – no tracks are available for purchase.

iplaying: Vessel (Losing Control Remix) – Pushing Reality – The Limitless Potential

For those who have no interest in technical talk, move onwards…

So I bought a 320GB external awhile ago which was an amazing purchase to accommodate my heavy television show downloading habits, as well as my live Smashing Pumpkins archive that I am building (which…may not be needed anymore now that the official archive.org project has begun allowing uploads? Hmm…maybe I should get rid of them…). I love the hard drive and the portability factor. I got this idea from Philipp since he had a laptop and I figured I would pick one up later on in life and would like a portable hard drive.

So I did end up picking up a MacBook last year which is great but I realized that I couldn’t write information to my hard drive for some reason.

After some research, I found out that the thing was formatted in NTFS which doesn’t allow Mac’s to write to the drive. They can read, but they can’t write. So I realized I had to format the entire drive into FAT32.

This posed a problem because there was no easy way to take off 280GB of information off of my external hard drive considering I didn’t have another drive handy.

Lo and behold, the heavens parted and Mike ended up picking up a 320GB hard drive WITH NETWORK CONNECTION (!!!) so I spent yesterday transferring the data, formatting the drive and transferring back. The entire process took about 12 hours I would figure.

So my issue is the fact that someone needs to get out there and make a new file system which is a global standard so we don’t end up in these situations! It would be highly convenient if I didn’t have to go through this process again!