James Lee Stanley

I have been having quite a challenging time of it with an incredible run of strange bad luck.  I can only assume this is the bad dress rehearsal before the fabulous opening night.

In a nutshell, since my return from Europe, none of my Sonic Foundry FX are working.  Even though I paid for them and registered them and used them for over a month before I left, they have reverted to demo status and send all kinds of strange electronic noises into my mixes.

After five hours on the phone with the Sonic Foundry people and getting absolutely no resolution, I have decided to use a different set of effects and call American Express about getting me my money back from these charlatans.  

When Sonic Foundry was owned by Sonic Foundry they were fantastic.   Since they were acquired by Sony they have become another  “go f%^k yourself” company as soon as you pay for the product.

So what I want to write about today is what to do when you run into this kind of a wall.

It makes no sense to curse God or ask, “why me?”    It has happened and what are you going to do about it?

For me, I went through each song and muted the SF effect but left it in place so that I could match the settings when I replace each one of them in every mix with a more reliable program.

It  was time consuming and I often felt like some toy God invented so he’d have something to do when he wasn’t letting George Bush become president and start an illegal war and bankrupt our entire economy.   I wish he’d paid more attention to George and a little less to me.

Sometimes I am clearly a favored child of God, (who, as God, shouldn’t have any favorites, don’t you think?)   And I can only assume that all this attention is just to accelerate my growth as a being.

Needless to say, I’m failing miserably, but to return to the point.   Instead of going crazy with these programs, fighting these programs, bewailing my bad luck, etc, I’m just moving on.

Don’t fight a bad program.    Dump it and get a good one.  And don’t forget that you get what you pay for.   Buy good programs and if you don’t get the support you need from them, let them and the world know about it and never use them again. 

But find something that works and move ahead.  Any other path is a waste of your time and your talent and the little life span you have left.