I wanted to work some with an old song I did in '92, using Electronic Arts Deluxe Recorder. So I pulled out the old LCII, found the file on one of the hundreds of old floppies I had lying around (it's a good thing I was anal about labelling things), copied it from floppy to the hard drive, popped in the DRecorder floppy, opened the file (man, that screen shot makes the software seem so ... old), and saved it as a Format 0 MIDI file.
So far, so good. Now, how to get it to another computer? One option would be to copy it to a floppy that the Linux box can read, since it's the only machine on my network with a floppy drive, but I don't have the software, that I know of, on this old LCII box. I do have a LocalTalk (PhoneNet)-to-Ethernet adapter, but for some reason that just wasn't working. The AppleTalk wasn't getting from one computer to another.
So I pulled out an old Power Mac 7100/66. This computer was my main axe for years, but now it is in a bit of disrepair. I couldn't get DRecorder working on it (the software was built for System 6, and it's running Mac OS 9), but I could copy the file via floppy, and then copy it to the Mac OS X Server box via AFP. Of course, to get the floppy in, I had to pull the cover off the computer, because it doesn't quite line up with the case ... so now I have computer parts and cables strewn all ove the room, but all in the name of art, right?
This has convinced me I need a USB floppy drive. You can get them for under $40, and I have a ton of floppies lying around, some of them with important old data from school etc.
And it worked; I got my MIDI file, and using Dent du Midi I got all five tracks imported into GarageBand. Now I've just got to clean it up in GB and play with it, which will take some time. I just wanted to get the data now while I still have my wrist.
Oh yeah, I should mention my wrist ... next entry.
