JaneParhamKatz commented:

Dear Vintage Man, I will have to think deeply to understand why you don’t have a new computer and cloud storage. There must be an important reason.

There isn’t one important reason, but there are several small reasons.

I don’t like throwing things away and tend to use equipment as long as it works. I don’t upgrade a hammer, so why should I keep upgrading a computer every couple of years. I do admit that when I recently switched from a 2008 laptop to a used 2015 model I happily experienced the advance of technology.

The old G4 Mac is in the back of the control room, its noise kept to a minimum by a dust-free box with four quiet cooling fans. It is connected to a video extender and a USB extender that amplify the signals and send them through long cables in a trough built along the wall and through a pipe under the floor. The cables emerge from the floor under the mixing desk and connect to two screens, a keyboard, and a mouse on the desk. Twenty years ago this was super cool. :-) If I was to buy a new computer, I would also need new screens and, worst of all, I would have to replace the wiring… that would not be fun!

Since my ProTools hardware is quite old it runs on the old and huge (first generation?) PCI cards that fit the old G4. Since then PCI cards shrank in size! So I would have to buy all new ProTools PCI cards that fit a newer computer.

Recording music feels more like a hobby these days. Recordings are an advertising that says I am still making music, so please come to a live show. One doesn’t make much money with recorded music. I can’t justify spending more money than I would make from the income of two new albums on new hardware, while the old hardware is still working. Yes, there are musicians who still make a lot of money, but it is less than 0.1%… Sound familiar? That tip of the economic pyramid becomes sharper every few years and the 10 percenters became the 1 percenters and now they are the 0.1 percenters. I read that about 90% of new albums on iTunes sell less than 100 copies. That’s astonishing, isn’t it?

In any case I am forced to look into alternatives, because my G4 has been misbehaving all week.