The northlondonhippy

I pur­chased a full copy of Logic Stu­dio, Apple’s audio pro­duc­tion suite of appli­ca­tions and loops, at the end of Octo­ber, when I bought my copy of Leop­ard. Around a week after that, I started installing Logic Stu­dio; yes­ter­day I finished.

Yes, you are read­ing that cor­rectly, it took me 6 weeks to get all of the soft­ware prop­erly installed and func­tion­ing on my iMac.

Why?

Sim­ple, because one of the instal­la­tion DVDs was no good.

The first time I tried to install the entire pack­age, the sixth DVD of seven was spit out by my com­puter, around 7 hours into the process. The DVD in ques­tion, Jam Pack Con­tent 2, had some prob­lem and my drive couldn’t read it.

Being the resource­ful sort, I decided to give it another try before con­tact­ing Apple. At the same point, around 7 hours in, the 6th DVD crapped out again. I phoned Apple.

Phon­ing Apple is never fun, they are always busy, you need to wait a while before you speak to the first human being and rarely can the first per­son you speak to, help you, neces­si­tat­ing a fur­ther wait. I was more relaxed this time, because I was armed with a fresh ser­ial num­ber and a recently pur­chased, boxed copy of Logic Studio.

After leap­ing suc­cess­fully through all the right hoops, I finally got to speak to some­one from the Logic depart­ment. I described my prob­lem to him in detail and he agreed I had a duff DVD. He con­firmed my details and said that a replace­ment DVD would be with me in 3–4 days. This was six weeks ago.

Like a twat, I sat by my front door, day in and day out, await­ing the knock of the post­man or courier with my replace­ment DVD and every day, it did not arrive. I stayed cool, I stayed calm, I waited a cou­ple of weeks and phoned again.

On sub­se­quent calls to Apple, you are armed with some­thing even bet­ter than a ser­ial num­ber, some­thing they call a case num­ber. A case num­ber from Apple refers to the spe­cific inci­dent you’ve con­tacted them about and it makes it much quicker to nav­i­gate through the hoops to get to the per­son who can help you.

I got the same guy in the Logic depart­ment, he has quite a dis­tinc­tive accent and that’s how I knew. He put me on hold to check on the sta­tus of my replace­ment and after a few min­utes, he returned to tell me that it would be with me in 3–4 days. This was five weeks ago.

I con­tin­ued to press my runny nose against my front win­dow, patiently wait­ing for the deliv­ery to come and mak­ing nasty, gloopy marks on the glass. I remained chilled, I was relaxed and as the hol­i­days approached, I for­mu­lated a plan of action.

I also did a bit of research on the inter­net and dis­cov­ered I was not alone with a dam­aged instal­la­tion DVD. It turned out many peo­ple had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence to mine, with the instal­la­tion fail­ing at the same point.

I’m guess­ing Apple had a seri­ous qual­ity con­trol issue with DVD num­ber 6 and get­ting them remade took a lot longer than expected. Or they just lied to me. Or both. It’s all very un-Apple.

I waited four more weeks, before decid­ing to phone Apple again and that was yes­ter­day. Just as I was look­ing up their num­ber on the ‘net to phone them again, there was a loud knock on the door and guess what it was! A courier with the replace­ment DVD. Yipppppeeeee!

I spent five more hours installing all the con­tent for Logic Stu­dio and at the end of it I was rewarded with a fin­ished instal­la­tion and all the loops and sounds in their proper fold­ers on my hard drive. Result!

Though, to be hon­est I was hop­ing to have a long, drawn out argu­ment with Apple which resulted in me receiv­ing some form of com­pen­sa­tion for my lengthy wait, but they stole my thun­der with their well-timed deliv­ery. If only I had phoned them a week before, per­haps I could have beat them out of some credit, or a free copy of Final Cut Express 4. Now, we’ll never know.

Now that I’ve got a full, work­ing copy of Logic Stu­dio cook­ing on my iMac, I can start think­ing about my next big exer­cise in futil­ity; my first northlon­don­hippy album.

Ladies, gen­tle­man and ston­ers, I’m pleased to announce that com­ing some­time in the 2nd half of 2008, I will be releas­ing the come­back record from a career that never was!

I present to you for the first time any­where, the title of my upcom­ing release:

“the northlon­don­hippy & the seven deadly sins — songs about sex and death”

My back-up band, “the seven deadly sins” are actu­ally only a six-piece…Sloth keeps miss­ing rehearsals.

I’ll be writ­ing and record­ing the record over the next sev­eral months, aim­ing to release it for free on my web­site some­time this sum­mer. I already have the bare bones of 5 songs in the works and ideas for the rest. The whole thing will be down­load­able, along with cover art.

If 1 mil­lion peo­ple down­load this puppy, besides bank­rupt­ing my band­with for a decade, I promise I’ll take my band and go on tour. No joke, no lie. I reckon if one mil­lion copies of this album are out there, spon­sor­ship for a tour would be a piece of piss.

No DRM, no credit card num­bers, it will be com­pletely and totally free. I might make you han­dover your email address, so I can keep you up to date with a newslet­ter or some­thing, but I would never sell, loan or give your details to anyone!

Here at Hip­pyCo Indus­tries Ltd (a divi­sion of Hip­pyCo Enter­prises plc), your pri­vacy is impor­tant to us, just as is ours. For that rea­son, we’ll never phone you up at home for a chat or show up unan­nounced for a cup of tea.

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