Produced by Dutchyyy Runtime: 31 minutes, 31 seconds "Cook Off 008 kicks off today, with samples provided by the one and only @Dutchyyy" - Athena [02/03/2023 12:15 PM] The full audio version of "Cook Off 008: Dutchyyy" (Evolving Portals) Where I flipped my own samples from the 5.26GB [110 files] folder I submitted for others to choose and flip from. While I didn't submit officially for my own challenge,  I always planned to flip my own samples live on stream after listening to everyones submissions during the Catalog Works Discord Playback Live Stream which happened March 2rd, 2023. So as soon as we all said goodnight & ended that super inspirational playback stream in the Catalog Works Discord.  A Portal was opened live @ twitch.tv/peacepeacegawd Cook Off 008 Submissions from: lordtstxn + Chucknessa + thxk_u + Es-K + Devin Burgess + Hammered Gold + Laotree + whale.cx + Harris Cole + YoshiroMare + KSG + ali wan kenobi + Stonewax + AshTreJinkins + tvkii + matt.e.j + whknws + AjaxX + indacouch + Tired Eyes + Appa (Jzs) + gozu the DJ + adamschmadam + Devon Who + b l o o p r + Athena Yasaman "Massive love and appreciation to you all for tapping in for Cook Off 008 ft. @Dutchyyy! This was one for the history books thanks to everyone coming together around these portals. of multi-hour" - Athena [03/02/2023 10:47 PM] _________________________ You can view/collect a 10 minute video snippet of my "after the challenge, challenge" live stream here: https://zora.co/collect/zora:0xaecf7d807b137eae8c67d24c4e0e66c1e6319266 It's available as a [free / unlimited edition] as part of my #starterpack because seeing #EvolvingPortals unfold with your own eyes helps to understand what's actually happening during these 100% improv, one take, long form audio recordings in a way that's kind of hard to believe or understand when just hearing them in audio form.   _________________________ Backstory: On January 26th 2023, while trying to test out if my new PC could handle playing music, while gaming using my virtual avatar a critical user error was made. New PC, new methods.  For this test all I needed was a playlist of my own music in the windows default media player but I wasn't familiar with the one that came installed w/ my pc "Groove Music".  It wouldn't let me drag and drop music into playlists, songs had to be imported and by mistake I chose to import my entire F drive (which was the main External SSD that held all my Ableton Live Project Files, Drums, Samples, Album Masters, Unreleased.  Basically my master vault. As soon as I clicked on that drive it began importing every single media file on that SSD (over 16k files to be exact) including drum one shots, everything....   Not ideal for what I was attempting to quickly test out,   which was just create a mini playlist of my curated music to stream to.  I wasn't trying to sort through 16k files so I just [shift] selected all and deleted everything that was just imported so I could just import a specific folder instead.  When I went to create a specific folder in my External SSD, I noticed all the audio files were gone.  I panicked, and quickly checked my trash and saw everything I deleted from the playlist in groove music was removed from my SSD and placed into the trash,  so I quickly restored the files but realized almost everything was still missing.  Then I saw the recycling bin had a storage limit, one that greatly exceeded and after research learned that the largest files that couldn't fit were permanently deleted. I'm now in full blown meltdown mode.  I consider myself somewhat computer savvy but hours and hours of research on how I could possibly recover my life's work were a bust.  Every page, video, forum all pointed to paid recovery software and I couldn't tell what was legit or not so I took to twitter and sent out an S.O.S. Flare... The homie Alez reached out and offered to pay for the recovery software,  and I spent the next 12 hrs, watching this software slowly move its progress bar.   The problem was, there was no way to recover files lost from the External SSD back on to the same SSD drive, so I had to set the recovery path to D: drive which is my 10TB disc hard drive.   The SSD was only 1TB, but when the software finally finished it said it recovered 2.7 TB worth of data...   I still don't understand this..... While I was able to recover a majority of the audio files,  most were recovered with different, incoherent file names.  So all of those Ableton Live Project Files had no way of finding where any of the samples or drums were located.  This absolutely decimated my spirit since there were like 7 project files I never even exported a rough version of and they were all the music I was most excited and proud of, now forever lost. Within the same 24 hrs as this happened, on my 52nd hour of not sleeping, I got an email from Catalog asking If I wanted to be the next artist to submit samples for the upcoming Cook Off 008...         Crazy timing huh?         I accepted, but explained the situation that just happened and said I would do my best.  I just lost access to all my Ableton Project Files, 2019-2022 so all the new stuff I would have loved to submit, so I ended up using my laptop and hooked up on old drive and dug into every project file I didn't recognize...    and began exporting chops, loops, drums of stuff I barely remembered making. By the time I was finished I had a 5.26GB Folder with 110 files in it...     The Largest amount of samples submitted for a Cook Off Challenge. My biggest pet peeve w/ sample challenges is when the artist submits like 3 files, and there is hardly any Harmonic or Melodic diversity to work with, so I made sure I provided enough variation in that folder for people to choose from to make submitting a flip as stress free as possible while in the most stressed state possible at that time haha.     I'm still feeling the loss from that day,  It messed up a lot of planned things in motion that were near completion and I've barely made new music this year because of that.  I'm very grateful to Alez for reaching out and lending support, I'm very grateful to Catalog for being a Platform that values music and not only holds these creative fun challenges but also participates in nearly all of them. Lastly, I'm thankful to everyone who showed up for my challenge.  It was super inspiring hearing so many talented producers putting their own spin on my samples. To this date, Cook Off 008 was the largest turn out in terms of submissions. That definitely makes me smile but I would love to see that record get shattered by more people joining in on future cook offs =) and thus, "Cook Off 008: Dutchyyy" (Evolving Portals) was born.