An Obituary

In a heartfelt shout out I must express my sincere condolences for Mr. Seagate Barracuda 9.2GB Ultra SCSI 3.5LP Internal Hard Drive purchased from MacMall in Memphis, Tennessee at a cost of $242.94 on December 29, 2000. On April 27, 2011 this worthy piece of gear humbly passed away quietly ceasing to exist. It flawlessly produced 12 CD projects of my own in a home studio driven by an Ohio State University surplus PowerMac 7100/80. On a shoestring budget I was able to piece together a professional MIDI/audio production tool seamlessly integrating digital audio and MIDI sequencing. With the help of Digidesign’s Sound Designer ll, Mark of the Unicorn’s Digital Performer and Unisyn, SampleCell ll, Adaptec’s Toast, and a Sharp MD-720 Mini Disk Recorder I was able to create music as good as any professional commercial recording studio. It kicked hard to the end scanning over 70 pieces of music on an Apple One Scanner lost with its demise. While I still possess several other SCSI hard drives, one possibly with Apple’s OS 8.5 still installed, I could recreate my personalized suite of music software. With tomorrow comes the task of retrieving my original install disks and CD-ROM’s of audio files. With a little luck and patience I may be able to resurrect this worthy computer-based audio/MIDI production system. All is not lost, because I have been diligent to upgrade this software with each purchase of a newer Apple laptop computer. This seemingly archaic combination of hardware utilizing NUBUS technology made producing music a snap. Maybe my removal and storing of the MOTU Micro Express MIDI interface was too much for it to handle. It felt the loss and decided it could not stand alone. Somehow in a stroke of good fortune I saw fit to copy my FreeMIDI setup to a floppy disk. While Mac OS X seems not to recognize these worthy files, still the archiving may be fruitful. Ten years is a reasonable existence, although many of these years were spent sitting idle in a box. The years it functioned saw great demand for its product recording digital audio flawlessly. Never once did I have a problem with this hard drive, and I will keep it as a token of my appreciation to the Creator for blessing me with the ability to compose, perform, and record music.