Tuesday 19 May 2009

Ahh baws.

In case anybody (IF anybody!) reading this is wondering why I never update or bother to promote this blog, it's because over the last couple of years I have been very busy studying for an HND in sound production. Of all the things the course (and education in general) has taught me, the thing that sticks out the most is that taking my hobbies and creative endeavours and try to make a living out of them is a really bad idea.

Sure, I've learned lots of other stuff like never trust anyone else to set up your gear, that everybody else is a fucking cretin (especially tutors), oh and a couple of things about acoustic theory and digital audio, but that's besides the point... On Friday, our main SSL/ProTools HD rig mysteriously crashed. We weren't told why, but were assured everything would be back to normal shortly. After coming in today to retrieve a few files off another machine, I was told by a fellow student who had been working in the SSL suite that morning told me that the cause was a mechanical HDD failure.
Everything that anyone who used that desk in the past 10 months or so is gone. Everything. My mixing and production assessment is null and void, with the very real possibility that I will have to return next year to resit, as well as many others who "were not dilligent enough" to back their work up. Great. Another year at this POS college.

What really awestruck me is the sheer lack of comprehension the staff have had in getting our 'amazing' new setup off the ground. Back when the new campus first opened, there were many complaints about various things that could have been handled better, all of which got the rather immature response that students were being 'ungrateful' despite us all channelling a rather exorbitant amount of state funding into the place to recieve a good education.
Where was the sense in purchasing four SSL AWS900 mixing consoles, each of which cost around £43 thousand (and ship with unstable firmware i might add), to then attach them to junkpile Dell desktop computers that couldn't have cost more than £300 a pop complete with a single piece-of-shit HDD that breaks down after 10 months?

I asked my tutor a shortened version of that question this afternoon, to be told rather nonchalantly that "it's a shame for the students who were not dilligent enough to back up their work". When I asked about a backup system, I was told that "ProTools doesn't support RAID". Well gee-whizz. Thanx for that total gobshite answer! Not only is that not strictly true (many users report successfully doing so), ProTools gives you the option to back a project up to a separate HDD as standard. Why was this not even looked at? Sheer idiocy. I'm seriously completely livid that they're blaming students for not backing their work up, when it would have cost them a nominal fee to outfit all the ProTools rigs with backup drives, in case of a crash.

Fuck it. I've wasted another two years of my life, getting an education that I'll likely never use. I'm done.

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