The problem was with the 25-year-old cassette deck that #1 Son’s band uses. It was a piece of shit when it was new, and the years haven’t treated it well. Last night we mastered directly from their 4-track recorder to my computer and the results were much better.

Yea!!!

#1 Son brought home a tape from his band yesterday and asked me to put it on my computer and burn it for him. I did, but I was really tired, and it sure didn’t come out sounding very good.

I’m going to try again tonight. I don’t know if it’s my sound card (shouldn’t be) or the software I was using (a distinct posibility).

I’m not a bad producer, but I’m not great as an engineer apparently. Somehow, “It’s supposed to sound like you recorded it in a garage on cheap equipment,” is a rather hollow explanation.

I’m feeling a little better towards WP today. I got a news feed up and working. And I figured out how to do some of the side-blog stuff by using link categories. So things are looking up a bit.

The newsfeed formatting isn’t perfect and CaRP isn’t creating valid XHTML, so I think I will need to tweak it a little bit, still.

But it works. And, as every good programmer knows, that’s more than 1/2 the battle!

[UPDATE 06/06/04] I plunked down my hard-earned $18.95 for CaRP Evolution, which gave me access to the ReplaceText plug-in. And that, boys and girls, has solved my invalid markup problem by allowing my to “fix” Yahoo’s invalid ampersands in urls.