Picked up another API 312 pre the other night, bringing me to three racked by OSA and one killer clone/upgrade in the form of a VP26. Combined with the modded GAP Pre 73, I have four channels of API and one Neve-ish, giving me five killer, killer channels for drums. Overheads through BLA Auteur. I need to pay off some bills so it’ll be a few weeks before I get anything new and substantial but I have some cool stuff coming up.

Immolith begin recording their full-length this weekend. Gonna be awesome. More news soon.

OK, Microsoft. What the hell?

A random Exchange 2010 service, in this case the Microsoft Exchange Address Book (MSExchangeAB), simply failed to start after a reboot. No errors in any logs, it just timed out. No troubleshooting information anywhere online. I thought about it a little and popped open the microsoft.exchange.addressbook.service.exe.config file and what did I find? This at the end:

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This is the exact same issue that has happened with another client’s Hyper-V Server, though there, an XML configuration file belonging to a Hyper-V VM is the being corrupted and disappearing from the Hyper-V console as a result. It happened to them twice and we were never able to find out why. I doubt I’ll ever find out why this just happened but I sure wish I could get the last two hours of my life back.

So I checked my analytics numbers today and was a little surprised at how much traffic is coming in. I am by no means breaking any records but enough people are apparently having trouble with RDS and Hyper-V that they’re coming here from Google over and over again. If by some chance you are someone who needs extra help with those or other Windows Server issues, feel free to shoot me an email: subvertallmedia-AT-gmail-DOT-com. I am also available for remote consulting work through my place of employment, Pro Computer Service, and you can get in touch if you’d like to talk about it.

This is a quick and stupid one but I thought I’d put it online in case someone else runs into this problem.

If you’re migrating from one Exchange server to another but leaving your stand-alone BES 5 server intact, make sure you’re using the latest version of BES. Exchange 2010 wasn’t supported until something like 5.0.1 SP1 but double-check that.

Second, check your MAPI profile after the new server is in. Open the Blackberry Server Configuration application, Blackberry Server tab, and hit the button to configure the MAPI profile. Make sure you’re logged in as BESADMIN or whatever user you created to manage your BES server and services. I’m not sure whether it’s supposed to reconfigure itself the same way Outlook does but I don’t think so, making it odd that I didn’t find this instruction anywhere as I was researching.

Give me a shout if this helps you out.

Coffin Dust came back in over the weekend to record three new songs and it was awesome. I did their last recording back in November, my first with my Royer R-121 so it was a special session for me. Since then, I have not only added a shitload of new gear but picked up quite a few new tricks and I was confident that this would be my best recording to date. Here’s a track.

That’s mix/master 2. There’s some cymbal bleed coming through the snare mic that the gate isn’t catching fast enough; I’m not sure if anyone other than me would have noticed if I didn’t just point it out and I can’t decide whether fixing it is nitpicking or not. Though I’m not without my complaints, I’m quite pleased with how it came out and think that it definitely is my best mix so far.

It’s amazing how much of a difference my new monitors have made. I always read claims that new monitors would change everything but I just didn’t get it; I mean, I felt like my old monitors (Event Project 6s) were great, how different could things really be with new ones? The answer: extremely different. I didn’t even notice it at first, all I knew was that I could hear the upper mids a bit better and they were far more boring to listen to, which when you think about it is what you want from studio monitors. My first mixes, though, some almost-finished stuff for my grindcore band Unrest, were markedly better than anything I had done before. I nailed Coffin Dust on mix 1 and then polished it up on mix 2, something that seemed impossible a few weeks ago.