Video: A Jukebox For Your PC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVgK5NfVMP0

Phew. Well, I finally did the followup on the SCSI tower video. This was a slog.

It's probably pretty clear that I don't really love working without physical specimens. A lot of people on youtube will make whole videos without a single object to actually hold in their hands, just jpegs and video clips - that gives me hives, and this was no exception.

As I explain in the video, I just wasn't able to get the right machines to demonstrate everything I wanted, and even if I had, they probably wouldn't have functioned. It's shocking how many of the things I cover actually work, but still frustrating when something doesn't. The lack of software was even more of a bummer though - I had really, really hoped this video would contain a segment where I show off an NT 3.51 server hosting a couple of Windows 95 or DOS+LANman clients, but it was just impossible.

I'm honestly kind of astonished at how intensely this subject has been memory-holed. There were, like, 15 different CD server packages at one point, and every single one is gone. I mean, gone - I am a professional internet searcher, if anything was left of this stuff, I think I'd have found it. Nothing exists. It's like it was scoured from the earth, there are no mentions on internet archive, no hits on ebay.

The hardware I understand, it's big clunky steel gear that nobody has wanted for almost 30 years; but the software? It was just floppies and CDs, why has every bit of it been scrubbed from the face of the planet? To say nothing of the databases which, as I mention in the video, ought to be out there in immense quantity. They were being sold for almost 15 years! How is every single one ever produced gone? We have better odds finding things distributed in far smaller quantities; the mind reels.

If I'd at least had the server software, I could have done this justice. All you need to demonstrate the CD server concept is a handful of drives, easily acquired, and obviously I could have used the Nakamichi changers or the Pioneer changer to make my points, but... nope. All gone, everything. So I had to make do with what I had, and, frankly, I'm not super pleased with the result.

It feels a little off-kilter, a little rushed, a little uncertain of itself, because honestly, there are very few subjects I've covered where I was "synthesizing" this much. I really had to go hard into speculation to make this narrative work at all, so I just couldn't hit a stride with the writing. Nothing felt correct, and I think as a result, a number of the things I say just... come off strangely. In particular, I started to wonder, about a third of the way through editing, if I was being unnecessarily harsh on the Powerfile - I expect to get a bunch of comments from people who own six and have never had a problem.

Had I not promised to make this video at the end of the SCSI Tower one, I probably would have trashed the script as unproduceable, but I'd already obtained the Pioneer changers and the Powerfile, and I wanted to at least try to cover them. And even still, if I hadn't already finished making the whole video, I'd almost want to just scrap it, then go back and shoot something half as long that just shows off the drives and includes none of the context. Oh well. At least now I can free up some space in the studio, and move on to something I feel more confident with.