Why my Nails is Nubs Today

First off Empire State of Mind is a really good song. Now that that's taken care of, why can't I stop trying to figure out my god damned network at work?! This thing is driving me crazy!

A quick rundown... We have four iMacs that students produce (mostly) loop based GarageBand projects on. I had this bright idea that if they save their projects as an Archive, meaning that any loops used are self-contained within the project rather than referring back to that particular loop's original location, they could save their projects wirelessly to our Time Capsule storage device and pull them down no matter what computer they're on. Wow! Problem solved! Aren't I a genius!?

You're right! I'm really not. This worked fine when most of the kids weren't quite tech-savy enough to figure out how to use the Time Capsule to move back and forth between machines and only one computer was really using it at a time. Now however, most of the projects are pulled from it wirelessly and I've run into a SNAFU (that is an acronym right?) in which, what appears to happen is that the wireless bandwidth of the Time Capsule bottlenecks anytime files are moving or the internet is in use. This causes a 10 or so megabyte GarageBand project take 10 or so minutes to open or save.

This is not an ideal situation when you already have a legion of kids who are already frustrated with you because you only give them an hour in the studio at a time. From there it just gets better. I was under the impression that GarageBand, once loading a project that had been saved as an Archive, was done with it's source folder and was running the show strictly from the computer's resources. Well, I'm assuming now, this is not the case since several students' projects that were only running five or six tracks in total slowed to a halt and could not play back because, according to GarageBand's error message, they had "too many tracks".

So now it's solution time and the first thing to try is drag and drop files to the desktop temporarily while working with them and then save back to the Time Capsule. Well, I tried that and sure enough the time to pull the relatively small files down was about 1 MB per minute, which is something I'm not willing to work with.

Next in line are tinkering with and resetting the settings of the Time Capsule to ensure that the problem is indeed a bandwidth issue and not an issue with the device settings or software that just so happened to kick in right when our usage started going up. That seems too good to be the true fix so then we start hitting some more pie in the sky plans. That's my phrase of the week by the way: Pie in the sky. Delicious. First line of attack in the war on load time and latency is a wired Ethernet connection run through the ceiling. I'll give it a shot with the computer closest to the Time Capsule and see what we get. If that doesn't work I have this crazy idea about a FireWire network, also through the ceiling, all daisy chaining to one or two external drives in an office somewhere, but that seems unreliable and costly because apparently FireWire only carries about 15 feet at a time before you need some sort of repeater (you learn something new everyday!).

After that I'm pretty lost... Media Bridges has a pretty awesome set up where users have a hard drive that pops into a sled at the front of the building and is then somehow wired to whatever computer they're using in the building. Something like that would be awesome. Can I have that? Last is consulting with good old Bill at the Apple Store and seeing if the file sharing capabilities of a server machine that we can't afford is the answer to all of our problems.

Oh, and did I mention that the whole time I've been trying to fix this problem there are approximately twenty or so teenagers yelling for my attention to help them with about a thousand different things.

There's never a dull moment I tell's ya'!