A frustrating day yesterday working on Prometheus. Decided to go through lots of the code to optimise it, when all I really needed to do was address this long-term, very rare and annoying bug. The crash seemed to occur in the area indicated in my previous post, but it's odd that it happens on stop(), not when normally playing (when 99% of the thread is being used). Crash reports don't seem to show any part of the thread running. My current guess is that the very check for the 'inplaythread' variable can cause a crash when the concurrent thread is independently accessing that variable - one clue to this is that the a longer waiting delay seems to reduce the instances of the crashes. One option is to ignore inplaythread, so I've stopped that check entirely and use WaitForSingleObject() to wait for the end of the thread, which is the correct way to do things and something I'd not been aware of.
The annoying thing is I spent most of yesterday and today making other tweaks and changes to the program when there wasn't much wrong, and generally this introduces more problems than it fixes. At about 12pm today, I deleted everything and restored the former version, spending just 10 mins making a few small updates including the fix above.
Brian May made his own instrument, and I have made mine. The instrument of today is software. It's unfortunate that it takes so much technical capability and care to keep it working, but it gives me unique power.
One other thing I did yesterday was to record the Hitler in High Heels vocals, and today the guitar solo. I'm becoming more careful at this, making sure its good enough to be heard time and time again forever. I'm listening back critically to everything.
I tend to avoid vocal processing; I prefer a high pass filter and nothing more except some reverb, but sometimes some mid-high EQ can help with clarity. Remember those Beatles songs with almost distorted mid ranges like Lady Madonna? This one seems to sound better with some of this crunch. For the 'Is that why you whip?' line I've added a whip-lash effect.
So, I'm spending a lot of time an energy in the medium of recorded music, which is generally unpopular and unprofitable for anyone who isn't signed to a major record label, and I have no plans to either promote or perform the music; but it will be published and I aim it to be as good as possible, push myself another notch, and after that, more music to push more notches. My primary goal is to strive to create the best. Artists on major labels probably don't have the time or the luxury of this motivation.
Talking of The Beatles, I had the idea that the children of the fab four should get together and form a band called The Fetals. Of course, they're rather old now themselves.
