sarine

Some handy apps to make Windows more tolerable: Paid: Directory Opus: https://www.gpsoft.com.au Process Lasso: https://bitsum.com Free: Everything: https://www.voidtools.com/faq/#what_is_everything PowerToys Run: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run

Generally speaking, on average, a Windows update has never done that to me. It's just a chore and an annoyance. I've heard more unfortunate experiences so maybe there is cause for concern for some people. In my experience every Windows version has improved on the previous - yes, even Vista. Not so sure about ME.

As already mentioned, a hardware/software configuration being unsupported doesn't mean it won't work. It means if you contact MS's support line with a technical issue they can shrug you off. The official "requirements" may be conservative at this point in time to weed out users with older hardware that could come with other problems (both hardware and software) besides Windows 11. The actual minimum recommended specs may change during the public testing phase. My ancient Ivy Bridge Xeon board by Supermicro had a TPM module header, so perhaps that's not a reason to panic. P.s. I don't get why people get excited and/or anxious over a new OS. For me it's like getting excited/anxious about buying new feet for my bed. It simply does not concern me enough to become emotionally involved in any measurable amount.

Just need Teams to support ASIO so you can route it to Jack and onward on demand. Or you could do some wonky workaround to get the WASAPI (or whatever it's called now) output routed into your audio interface's inputs.

I'm not much of a rock person, although I do admire some of the usual icons' crativity. My first introduction to "this kind of music" was when I found some of my dad's C cassettes and just checked them out of curiosity. It was probably the second time I felt in a concrete way my musical horizon expanding in a brief moment. It was Jimi Hendrix. The world of sounds was amazing. I was probably about 11 years old. (The first time was when my dad gave me a C cassette of Jarre's Oxygene and said "listen to this, it'll take you into space.") After that it's been Metallica, D-A-D, Nirvana, Offspring (before Americana), Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and a bunch of others. In my 17's I discovered electronic music (for the first time since Jarre), western classical music, followed by ethnomusic/folk, and for the next decade or so I listened to very little anything else. I had a phase during which I only listened to rap. I can still digest anything, except "heavy metal", or mostly any sort of "metal" for that matter... It just makes me feel crap. I also don't like modern jazz with its meaningless melodic content. I've seen Roger Waters live, although I'm not a huge fan of Pink Floyd. My favorite tracks from them are Atom Heart Mother and High Hopes.

Others for Windows: https://www.arturia.com/products/analog-classics/ob-xa-v/overview https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/products/bx_oberhausen.html I have bx_oberhausen and my "verdict" is; I wish I could make a pleasing sound with this thing. Occasionally it's quite not-bad for aggressive bass. So there's that. Whatever that is.

SuperVision, and slicing on Sampler tracks.

This thing any good? https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/products/wedge_force_matcha.html

It's supposed to be an equalizer.

It the installer comes as a single "archive installer" .exe you could try extracting that into a folder and look inside for the separate VI installers.

I got Trax in hopes of being able to voice-act multiple characters in a game, and Verb for creating realistic space around sound effects and speech. I need to wait until I get a better mic before I can start fiddling with Trax more seriously. What I like so far is that even with the crappy, horribly noisy source material I've been able to create very convincing voice transformations. It's not a one-click wonder machine and it does things under the hood where you can't look and tweak, but with what you have it seems quite easy to begin homing in on "the" sound. It has optional 1x or 2x upsampling. Compared to the other tools that do similar things and which I've tried, Trax just produces more realistic results. I can do the robot, demon, pipsqueak chipmunk etc. sound on pretty much anything that can do pitch and formant shifts, but with this thing I was for the first time able to turn an adult man into a little girl that sounded eerily realistic. The source being horrible quality and recorded without taking this into account, the prosody was still off, so the illusion wasn't quite there yet, but eerily close. I feel optimistic about using Trax for acting multiple voices, after I get familiar with the process and take that knowledge to the recording stage where most of the work gets done by altering my speech in ways that make it easiest for Trax to transform it into the target character's voice in a clean way. I haven't played much with the Verb yet, and I'm not a reverb afficionado by any stretch, so suffice it to say that to me the spaces it creates sound very, very immersive, and perhaps in some way more clean than other reverbs I've used (and like for other reasons). I only tried presets and a little tweaking of parameters so far, but it seems like Verb doesn't really add any "special sauce" to the sound but rather creates a sense of a real, tangible space around it, and that's all. Not sure how desirable that would be in music production, compared to more "musical" reverbs with their coloring or mix-gluing [side-]effects. Verb didn't seem to torture my CPU much at all (using the presets), but with upsampling and some other parameters tweaked I quickly found Trax can go heavier than any CPU can handle. That was before I found the multi-threading option in the settings. Trax consists of three separate modules (separate plugins), of which one went bonkers when I adjusted some parameters in realtime while it was on the same insert chain with the transformer module (of which I spoke above), all sound stopped playing and even disabling the plugin wouldn't help. When I deleted the plugin from the chain, Nuendo crashed. 😞 Oh well. Didn't have time for much more today...

Figured I'd get IRCAM Studio at $339 as the lowest I found it to have been was $249 on Black Friday 2019... Price went up to $449 after my purchase. Trax went down to $359. I guess Trax and Studio are still discounted by $40 and $50 (which is not that significant at this price point) until Aug 2. I suppose it's possible there are other "hidden" discounts without the red price-cut marker text. But it seems like EveryPlugin overlooks updating the prices sometimes. Their terms of service reserve them the right to cancel purchases in such cases, but they didn't, which is cool. (still off-topic, but technically a deal which I didn't think deserved its own topic, so I just followed up on here)

There's also Luminar. https://skylum.com/luminar-ai-b Just throwing things in the air in case it helps somebody. You know what's best for you. 🙂

Confirmation bias. 😋 I'm not sure if PCmag is the only source of information you'll ever need. That is of course relevant to discussion. I don't do photo post-processing so unopinionated about this.

I have to agree with aidan here, it's something worth taking a better look at. At the very least you should sign up for the free 90-day trial. I don't know what they mean by "for good," but this software suite is worth a try just for the slick UI and light weight alone. 🙂 YouTube & the rest of the webs has a lot of hype on these products. Take with a grain of salt as people generally just enjoy getting hyped up in its own right. I've also heard complaints about instability, though most of them were not very recent. That said, I got them all and really like working with these tools. No crashes on Windows yet, on i[Pad]OS yes.

I've actually been having half-an-eye on Photoshop CS6 because I hate subscriptions so much, but even the second-hand prices are un-sane. Affinity Photo does everything I currently need anyway.

A Windows major version update. How thrilling. I wonder what fancy new features metrosexual GUI bling and widgety-fidgety teetertotters they have added to enrich my experience torment me with. The way I live; a new Windows version lands, I install. When the chore is done, hopefully I can get back to the things I was doing. Usually the latter part involves re-living the "What, they *****ed up the control panel again?!" moment or some variation of it about 157 times. But I always live to tell the tale.

Softube is located in Sweden. Maybe they don't ship hardware to private customers over the pond. Many manufacturers leave that to retailers.

Console 1 has been discounted at Thomann for a good while now, so it probably has nothing to do with this "flash deal." Something to consider is that Console 1 is at "MK2" right now. They might try to get rid of them to make room for MK3. I don't know if it's time for that yet though, as I've only recently found out about this gear.

It updated the discounted price just fine when added to cart individually, but I'm in EU.

In EU they do. Console 1: 499.00 -> 349.30 € Console 1 Fader: 599.00 -> 419.30 € From Thomann prices, the differences are -40€ and -100€, respectively. This guy had mixed feelings: REVIEW: Softube Console 1 MIXING ON THE SOFTUBE CONSOLE 1 This guy can't shut up about how great everything he uses is: My favourite Controllers for Cubase - Ask me YOUR questions! Console1 Fader IN-DEPTH: The best multi-fader controller for Cubase?

Rebelle is supposedly good. Its focus is real media emulation and its closest comparative would probably be ArtRage. A real plus over Corel Painter (which has been included in a HB before) is that it lacks the "Corel", which means it lacks the malware/trollware/doucheware that is forcefully installed with Corel products. Everything else in the bundle is meh personally. Would still buy it for Rebelle if I had a desktop drawing tablet.

Then my advice would be try the free options first. Try to find the minimum amount of transforming you need to do to make the source sound good enough for your purposes, and consider processing the whole track even if just subtly to color it evenly artificial rather than making individual notes sound out of place. Vocal exercises can do wonders for future takes and with age come better analytical skills and learning strategies that you can employ in turning some of those deficits in vocal agility into character. For example, if you find that you have difficulty singing in key or hitting certain notes, it may pay off to sing controllably off-tune in a way that better accommodates later pitch-correction for more consistent sound, rather than micro-edit mistakes every other phrase. Just some thoughts... I'm not a singer.

This doesn't sound realistic at all. At the risk of sounding patronising (because I don't know what you know); The human voice is complex and so are the physiology and math involved in explaining and modeling it. Cutting to the chase; the sound is generated in the vocal cords acting as the oscillator and then goes through a series of resonating dynamic chambers called the vocal tract where it becomes filtered in various ways, greatest effect of which is felt by the harmonics of the original sound, producing what are called the "formants" of the sound which constitute most of the characteristic timbre of your unique voice. (In addition, other parts of your anatomy produce their own sounds in the process and are then mixed in with the actual periodic sound that is singing). Retuning the end result is quite a lot more difficult problem to solve than turning a frequency knob on a sine wave. There is practically no moment during such sound production when we could stop the clock and say what's going on inside the "instrument" is deterministic within the scope of our best physical modelling efforts. AFAIK it's part of the reason why speech synths are still stuck in the uncanny valley. Now after we do a fair bit of simplifications, we can approach realistic emulation of an isolated moment of voice production or manipulation, but even then - in the latter case - the key is high quality source material, i.e. the more "pure" and spectrally narrow, and the smaller is its dynamic range, the easier it is to fix. Feel free to let me know if you think I'm talking out of my rear - I'd love to be proven wrong. My point is that there's a reason why Antares AutoTune and Flux IRCAM Trax are so expensive; trying to do such things, let alone doing them well, is not for the faint of heart. So there is not much serious competition. (Feel free to point me to some as I'm also on the lookout for a no-less-than-amazing voice manipulator...) There are quite a few affordable plugins that provide some ways to manipulate the pitch and formants, and a bunch of other parameters I don't understand. iZotope VocalSynth 2 was already mentioned and can be grabbed for that $50, but don't expect miracles. Polyverse Manipulator seems to have pretty impressive DSP going on, but doesn't seem like it's being apologetic about artificiality. I'm pretty sure Melda's tooling could achieve great results in skillful hands, if you're not hell-bent on perfecting every transform. Alas, they're not exactly cheap at MSRP either, so better wait for a sale if you've got the engineering mindset to attempt that route. There's more (because Melda), but these sprung to mind: https://www.meldaproduction.com/MAutoPitch (free!) https://www.meldaproduction.com/MVocoder https://www.meldaproduction.com/MTransformer https://www.meldaproduction.com/MCharacter https://www.meldaproduction.com/MHarmonizerMB

I'm thrilled and excited to see "package management" that ungrateful Linux bastards took for granted for so long slowly but steadily making its way onto Windows. Go get'm boys.