Leopard – Preparing the External Drive

I must admit I’m just a bit giddy about this new cat. It is a new experience for me to be excited about an operating system upgrade. It is surreal for me as a former PC guy to contemplate a new operating system without a hardware upgrade of any sort. Nevertheless, here I am watching the Apple propaganda videos and reading anything I can get my hands on. As part of this upgrade I plan on embracing Time Machine so I had to get serious about external storage.
I have a 1TB Firewire drive and a collection of USB external drives I’ve collected over the years. I spent the evening configuring the Terabyte drive for Leopard and thought I’d share my strategy with everyone.
I’ve partitioned the drive into four drives as follows:

1. MacBook Pro SD

This is a 130GB partition for my SuperDuper image. My 160GB drive actually has a capacity of about 148 GB but I can’t imagine ever running the drive up to 130GB. (Famous last words)

2. Final Cut Media Drive

This 120GB partition holds all my external media for Final Cut Studio, Logic and various Jam Packs. Interestingly, I have this data also duplicated on a portable Western Digital portable Passport drive. They both have the same name and Final Cut, Logic, and Garage Band all see the data regardless of whether I’m plugged into the Firewire or USB Passport. Excellent.

3. Time Machine 350GB

There are lots of opinions about how big a Time Machine Drive should be. I’m going with just a tad over double the drive capacity. I guess we’ll find out together.

4. Data ~316GB

This is where I keep the rest of my data. It includes the Aperture masters, Videos, a 40GB iTunes library, Encrypted legal files and a host of other data I can’t bring myself to dump.
So there you have it. I’m good to go with Leopard this weekend. One other precaution I’m taking is keeping a SuperDuper copy of my Tiger rig on a USB drive for a few weeks after I upgrade to Leopard just in case.

Technorati Tags:
MacSparky, leopard, time machine

Continue reading →

MacSparky Music – Round Midnight

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a fascination with Jazz music. Throughout High School and College I played piano and saxaphone with numerous bands and even did studio work before falling into law school. It is a standing joke around my house that when everyone was listening to Duran Duran, I was listening to Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck. I first heard Thelonious Monk when I was about 12 but my piano teacher wouldn’t let me play his music. Well it took me nearly 30 years but here I am stickin’ it to the man. This was done in one take so there are a few funky notes but … ummm … those are correct .. it is Monk after all. Enjoy friends.

Download ‘Round Midnight

Continue reading →

MacSparky Music – Over the Moon

Okay … I must admit … I still love E.T. I think I like it so much because that WAS my childhood. The bicycles, the D&D, the late nights with friends, the whole thing (excepting the alien … wink). So I’ve been working on playing my favorite melody from the movie and got a somewhat passable version recorded over the weekend. I am going to try and do this with more orchestra instruments later but for now I was just happy to get to the end on the piano. Enjoy.

Over The Moon

Continue reading →

Logic Fun and Links

This weekend I am officially taking a break from the law and (in addition to playing/swimming with my kids) planning on spending some time with Logic. I have about 7 different music projects all in one state or another of completion. While I doubt I’ll finish any of them this weekend, I will have fun trying. In the meantime I found a great link at MacMediaCast for musicians linking some very good plugins right here. Check it out.

Continue reading →

Rock and Roll Baseball

Take Me Out to the Ballgame – MacSparky style
I’ve got some really great footage of the kids playing baseball. I wanted to put it to the music for “Take me out to the Ballgame” and decided to record it myself. Using Band-in-a-Box, Logic, and my MIDI keyboard and WX11 Wind Controller (MIDI Sax), I came up with the attached as my first attempt at using Logic. For some reason it makes me laugh to think I laid down the Hendrix guitar with a MIDI Sax. I really like the instrument sounds but clearly have lots to learn. Its kind of funny that my first recording as an avid jazz fan is more along the lines of hard rock. My sister in law (a SERIOUS baseball fan) thinks it an abomination. Enjoy anyway.

Continue reading →

The Left Side of My Brain

I’ve recently upgraded my iLife applications to some of the pro versions, specifically Final Cut and Logic. While I toyed with these things on computers before (I used to be a professional musician), I never really grasped how much a computer could be a tool of my creativity until switching. I’m going crazy with creative outlets lately, just ask my wife. It is just too easy. Well, the short of it is I plan on not only updating this site with lawyer/productivity items but a bit of the creative as well. As Captain Jack would say, “Ye be warned.”

Continue reading →