Dead SCSI Bits

Some time ago, there was a cool audio project hosted by Radiantslab called DeadSCSI. And there was also DeadSCSI 2. It all appears to be gone now, but there is at least some information available in the wayback machine. I contributed in both rounds as Eucci.

When Ergo Phizmiz recently tweeted a link to this page of failing hard drive sounds, it got me thinking about my bits of the DeadSCSI project that I had laying around on my studio drobo. I spent some of saturday doing some lightweight remastering. Early Eucci, where I abused the computer like I used to abuse tape, is pretty rough in its output quality. Levels are just all over the place. DC Offset lingers here and there. It's a mess. But there are some pretty spectrum graphs.

Last night I uploaded the tracks to my Rive collection on archive.org and cut a release as rive 058.

What is mildly interesting about this is that although all of the tracks were re-finalized on Saturday, I didn't upload them until last night. It was a process I was starting to put off, remembering that I needed to name the files properly, upload them, enter metadata, and make a web page on euc.cx. Not that big of a deal, really, but big enough to put off until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Last night, when I got home from work and after I had walked the dog (enjoying some unseasonal warmth before winter makes its fierce return later this week), I was thinking about what to do from that moment until dinner. I was starting to get ready to play the excellent Red Dead Redemption, but I knew I had to cut this release. Then I remembered something Merlin Mann said in the first or second episode of the Back To Work podcast. He basically said that it's easy to complain about needing time or certain circumstances in order to work on something, but that we don't complain about needing that time or certain circumstances to play video games, and we sure as hell can sit there and play a video game for an hour. It feels like a shame to have to be reminded of this ridiculousness, but it's something I apparently need to remember constantly. So instead of playing Red Dead for an hour, I spent the time preparing the release. It took a little bit longer than expected and the dog was getting impatient towards the end. But overall it was a nice use of that time.

There are many more releases to come, including some new material.