Final Update (For Now)

Several years ago, the monitors I used to mix my music blew. I had a very difficult time mixing and mastering my audio after that. So much so, I messed with the same few tracks over and over for 2 years and never really finished them. My output slowed to a crawl. Last year I had a jolt of inspiration and finally decided to ignore my lack of adequate monitoring and take a more lo-fi approach and not worry about perfect audio fidelity. Then, my trusty old Darla 20 audio card, the heart of my recording studio, finally died. Despite that, I decided to push on with a crummy old mini-jack hobbled Ensoniq AudioPCI card. Then more problems cropped up - my hard drive became unstable AND my video card died.

And then yet more problems arose... to make a long story short, I had a string of hardware failures. Expensive hardware failures. Hardware I can't afford to buy. And I'm still dealing with them. We (my wife and I) managed to scrape together enough to replace my motherboard, CPU, RAM and video card so I could rebuild my PC. However, I'm still lacking a usable audio card (built in audio simply doesn't work with some of my software). To top it all off, because of a bad power cable when building the new PC, things have become unstable. USB isn't functioning properly now so I have to send all the parts back for replacement.

These hardware failures coupled with the inability to purchase critical hardware like an audio card and an external storage solution for backups gives me little choice but to put Shadowjack on hold indefinitely.

I'd like to thank the few of you who cared. Your encouragement kept me going. Unfortunately, encouragement and caring doesn't buy expensive hardware. I can't record music on good vibes.

Dreams are cheap, making them reality isn't.

Computer Update

For those of you who don't follow me on Twitter, I have ordered the parts for my computer. We were able to scrape together €345,32 for an AMD Athlon X2 7750 CPU,mobo, 2GB RAM,GeForce 9600 GT,and 580w modular PSU. I'm reusing the case (which I like and is in good condition), HDDs and card reader from a fried Compaq. All I can do for now is wait until the parts arrive.

I only had 3 or 4 songs to go before I called the album complete. The computer broke down at a bad time. It actually stopped functioning at the exact moment I worked out the direction I was going to take on the final version of I'm a Man (On the Moon) and begin recording it. Which, as you can imagine, was beyond frustrating. As soon as I get the PC rebuilt, that is the first thing I plan on finishing.

Since I haven't been able to work on any music, I've been working on concepts for 2d racing game reminiscent of the original F-Zero for the SNES. It's been rough with this crummy laptop, the GIMP just runs. Trying to do multiple things at once often results in the laptop freezing up. Despite that, I've managed to get quite a bit of artwork done. I'll post some of the images on my art blog soon. I'm going to seek out programmers once I get a bit more of the concept work done. If anyone knows someone that might be interested, please have them contact me via email: shanesemler (at) gmail.com.