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Day Two Hundred Ninety Nine

So, Monday night, I said that I'd be content if we got Skype up and running, and explored the file transfer situation a bit. As it turned out, that's exactly what we got accomplished. We got started about twenty minutes to 4 this afternoon, and over the next two hours, we got almost all the way to being able to start.

She's using the Magix Music Maker in her process, so I had her send me a file that she had been messing around with. After a considerable amount of digging about, we found a way to take her MMM file and convert it to an mp3, which allowed me to drop it into iTunes. Once I could do that, I could burn it to a CD. Having done that, I transferred the file to my studio console (Boss' BR1180-CD), and imported it. As I had hoped, it worked well in my recording gear, allowing me to drop in a simple guitar part over her looped rhythm track. Then, I bounced it down, burned it back onto a CD, and loaded it into iTunes on my end.

This is the point at which we ran into trouble. We spent almost an hour trying to figure out how to take the file I sent her from mp3 format back into an MMM file. By the time she had to quit for the day, we still hadn't gotten it figured out. Glutton for punishment that I am, I kept digging after our session ended. I wound up finding a 30 day free trial of an earlier version of MMM online, so I downloaded it and started messing around. Actually having the program in front of me made it a whole lot easier to find what we had been searching for, and I think I figured out the file transfer situation. I sent B. an excited text message, and then fell asleep for a few hours, completely missing her response. By the time I woke up, I knew she'd be asleep for the night, so my reply will have to wait for tomorrow.

We're hoping to find a steady evening to try and get some work done on this thing. Right now the next time we have scheduled is Sunday night after I get done with work. At the moment, that feels like an eternity away. I know this whole thing will start slowly, and pick up steam as it goes, but it's hard not to get carried away with wanting to get a lot done very quickly. I'll come back to where I started: we got done what I went in expecting to get done, and for me, that's enough for today. Just wish I had found my free trial earlier, maybe that way we could have actually gotten started.

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