This post will be short, because no empathetic person likes having to read about depression. That said, I've been dealing with it for a large portion of my life, and it lead me to anxiety and self-deprecating thoughts. Mind, I've never been into the whole self-harm thing, but even if the affected doesn't try to take a creative hit, it'll happen anyway. It has been difficult for me over the last decade to find the motivation and joy in just doing things, and while I've been able to on a few notable occasions, they were all community-driven efforts that relied on strong communication to advance individual projects. I have had a considerably difficult time pushing myself to engage in personal projects, be them coding, playing games, writing music, even listening to music or watching movies - if they weren't activities that I could share with another person. Having coped with these issues for a long time, I learned that involving people in the things I do generally makes it more enjoyable, so my coping mechanism was to experience life with others by my side. As we all know, those opportunities don't always exist (and sometimes shouldn't), so I'm tackling that major hurdle here.

Saxxon and I have been good friends for about a month and a half now, and already we've been discussing coding projects, gaming, music remixing and composition, and have spent a good long while pondering the things we could use each others' respective skills for in terms of collaboration. He knows I suffer from anxiety and depression and have recently sought treatment, so for me to suggest and actually follow through with initiating a project probably seemed like a big deal. We recently decided to work on transcribing and remixing a song from Final Fantasy VIII (Force Your Way), partly due to Round 5 of Insert Credit(s), as it was the first remix track we played that night. It's a song I've heard plenty of times before, so reproducing the various instruments wasn't difficult for me - at least by singing or humming. Transcribing the actual music with its polyphony was proving to be a bit difficult due to the reverb in the track, plus some leads on top were extremely melismatic. Saxxon, of course, had a "workaround" of sorts - why not render the audio without reverb by emulating the game's engine and the processor from the PS1?

Frankly, I didn't even know that was possible, but lo and behold, a PSF with the code and data from Force Your Way was soon obtained. With the help of a handy Winamp plugin, the song was rendered without reverb, revealing a lot better information about the tracks used. We still had the issue of actually transcribing the audio, but it seemed a lot simpler now. A thought occurred to me then, though - if we could get access to the raw audio data and if the format uses channels/tracks, perhaps the spec had something for track volume; perhaps we could 'solo' each track individually and transcribe them one-by-one?

Saxxon set off to work, writing a console app to parse the PSF format - it worked! He was able to decompress and recompress the data and maintain a file that could be played back with the Winamp plugin. While the project isn't complete yet, we now have a framework for manipulating data, which we found was simple raw MIDI data! Even still, it's not quite done yet, so rather than wait for him, I decided to continue onward the good old fashioned way of looping measures in Audacity.

That, right there, is a drive to do something that I hadn't had for months, years, whatever; the desire to push forward in a project, knowing that I was at a disadvantage, knowing that I'd have an easier way to do it soon. I wanted to make progress - and that progress involved using a bunch of software I hadn't touched in months. Today, I worked in Finale 2014, PreSonus Studio One Producer, Kontakt 5, and manipulated a handful of samples to find stuff suitable for my transcription. I was pretty frustrated throughout the process, but managed to make decent headway, knocking out most of the channels for the first 16 measures of the song (rather accurately, I might add). While it isn't a grand amount of work for anyone seasoned in this type of thing, for me to even have tried to do something productive was a personal victory. As of right now, it's very difficult for me to maintain my focus, so I'm likely going to break until Saxxon returns tonight, but progress is progress - I'll take it.