Starship Krupa

The page says that the sale started on January 16, but I don't see it mentioned here, and I didn't notice it until now, so here she is:

Save up to 80% off a selection of Air Music's fantastic instruments including DB-33 Organ, Mini Grand Piano, Loom Classic Synth and Boom Classic Drum Machine. All now only £17.95 / $19.99 for a limited time.

That limited time being until February 4th.

I have DB-33 and it's really good, and the Leslie emulation may be used as a separate VST. I have no experience with any of the others, but IME, AIR's stuff will be well worth the discounted price.

On 1/17/2019 at 7:10 PM, chris.r said:

I was lucky to get it free while it was being introduced 😋

This. Every kick and snare track I've done since then. Gatey Watey on all of them.

It's not like I couldn't duplicate what it does with other high-tech gates I have like Unfiltered Audio's G8, but dang, with GW it takes seconds. Threshold, frequency slider, done.

3 hours ago, John said:

I have always given Ozone respect. It is a great tool well made and with an outstanding GUI.  My favorite version was 5 but 8 advanced is growing on me. 

What do you think of Neutron?

I got the Elements Edition in one of the loss-leader deals. I use it like I do Ozone. Throw on a preset and then adjust it to my taste. Whatever the wizard is supposed to do, I found it....surplus to my needs.

I could see where experienced mix engineers might be somewhat down on iZotope's suites if they consider them a crutch that lead to hyped sounding crappy mixes done by amateurs. Maybe they can be, but so what? They also contain some really great-sounding processors and other tools, and in my observation, iZotope do everything they can to steer their users in the direction of learning how to do it for real.

What's at stake? Some kid gets to have fun making a track that they think sounds awesome, dude! And if they try to bring it to anyone serious, they will send them back to their bedroom where they will have to figure out where they went wrong anyway.😁

3 hours ago, Billy86 said:

I ultimately figured it out (set dithering to none in the Export Audio GUI and let OZ8 do the dithering on the master bus). As scook pointed out, the one sure way is to Export the .wav mixdown file out of CbB and into the stand-alone version of OZ8. That takes CbB out of the equation all together. Working on a second project that way.

Ah, so you did it like in my second example. Righteous.

Are you using that Referencing module that comes with it? That thing looks amazing.

It's really great that you can use the modules as individual VST's in the Advanced Edition. I like their Maximizer and EQ, and would like to use them by themselves without all the latency and overhead that the suite induces.

John, I am sure with you on their GUIs being great. I believe that a good-looking and intuitive UI is important since we spend so much time looking at them. They should give us a feeling of excitement about the product and iZotope's do. (my old software biz guy kicking in here) I don't mind staring at them while I tune the modules. They're dark, not glaring.

I would not mind Our Favorite DAW getting some "work" done in that regard, but then again, the theme jockeys are doing a fine job.

5 hours ago, Skeptik said:

Also, on another note, something that kind of pisses me off.  I bought Sonar Platinum for $600 and less than 5 months later it's completely free.  I will be pissed off about that for years to come. 

Because....?

After all, you are getting what you paid for. The lifetime updates are flowing still. Better than what you paid for, IMO, because there are several reasons that freeware licensing makes for better software than payware, for long-term users.

Which suggests that you're pissed off at others' good fortune, which seems rather petty. 🤨

To help you not be so angry about that, consider this: I'm one of the people who got Cakewalk by BandLab for free. Number one, I didn't get to use it until April 2018. Number two, and this is a big one, Cakewalk is a program with a few added plug-ins. Sonar Platinum Suite was a friggin' monster package with a lot of extra software, some of it 3rd party that costs a pretty penny to buy (Melodyne, Superior Drummer), and some of it proprietary than nobody can buy (as yet) and would love to (L-EQ's, CA-2A, z3ta, Channel Tools). And you still get to use all of that. 🤘

There are many instances of payware turning freeware. Back when web browsers were new especially. Netscape and Opera were once payware browsers. I own a license for Opera that I paid for. It is one of the things that happens with software. Companies go under. Companies get sold. Individual products get sold. Key programmers quit. Products are dropped. I was at Macromedia when they bought Deck and subsequently killed it.

Number three, hey, thanks, sincerely, for helping keep the operation afloat and paying for the development. It wouldn't be here without licensing fees from users when it was payware. I was even one of them, long ago, now that I remember. I paid to upgrade to Sonar from a copy of Cakewalk Studio a friend gave me, back in 2002 or so. Now I'm pissed at myself! Why should I get for free what I had to pay for....wait a minute....

Number four, try to welcome the new users, because they're going to have good ideas for good ol' Cakewalk, increase the visibility, be fun to talk to, etc. I'm helping out as best I can, some of my praise made it onto the fliers they hand out at trade shows.

Number five, check out the new stuff they're doing with the Export to BandLab. You know that's going to turn into Import From BandLab, and at that point, we'll be able to trade projects back and forth over the 'net. Sonar went from being kinda stodgy to Cakewalk being closer to the cutting edge. Not even a year later, it's got a module that's an interface to a social media platform. Dang! Avid has their cloud thing with Pro Tools First and all, and it turns into something you have to pay for pretty quickly, but BandLab so far has put no cap on how much of their cloud space you can use for projects. I'm looking forward at least to just being able to swap stems with my buddy down in Indio.

You're getting what you paid for, other people are getting a fraction (a significant one, to be sure) of what you paid for for free. Don't waste anger on that.

Heaven knows, it could have been way, way worse.

6 hours ago, witch_wyzwurd said:

I wouldn't understand why anyone would be okay with it just to get something for free. That's a hell of a slippery slope.

Curious, what web browser did you use when you typed that?

I think that a fun giveaway item at NAMM would have been little tinfoil hats with the BandLab logo on them.

Okay, don't leave us hanging, where does that slippery slope lead to? What is at the bottom of it? Rather than this vague smoke, exactly what are you suggesting?

I'm a practical man. If you think I should not use this very useful software that I am being offered use of for free, tell me what negative consequences I will suffer if I use it. We've had many conspiracy ding-dongs around with the usual vague stuff about "you're fooling yourself" blah blah blah. Well, if I'm fooling myself and there's a slippery slope and you know more than I do, I'm all ears. Tell me what you know.

If you're using Cakewalk, what is your motive in posting this kind of thing? To deter other people from using it? To try to make other people feel uneasy about using it? To appear smarter than other people, as if you have special knowledge of the way the world really works? To get attention? What's your game?

5 hours ago, witch_wyzwurd said:

It's already known.

Well then, imagine a similar scenario for BandLab and you'll be well on your way to understanding!

What I'm having a hard time understanding is how it is, almost a year after BandLab issued their first, already improved version of Cakewalk, along with a statement to the existing user base about their intentions, followed by nothing but the kind of free updates (stability and speed fixes, prayed-for features) that most long-term user bases would die for, and living up to the statement of intent, we are still getting getting salvos from the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt Brigade.

We beat the poor horse past recognition in the old forum.

It's 2019! If there's someone alive, much less a computer user, who can seriously ask the question "how can you make money on free software?"

Your web browser, your Android phone, at least half the web servers you visit every day....FREE SOFTWARE.

The operating system, Windows 10, on the computer I am using, is effectively free software. Why? It came with Windows 7 installed on it 8 years ago, and Microsoft upgraded it for....free. Windows 10 must have cost a FORTUNE to code! And they say that it's a lifetime upgrade license, too, just like Sonar Platinum. OMG, everyone knows you can't make money doing that! How are Microsoft going to stay in business?

Happy to hear about BandLab's robust presence as well as Anaheim Convention Center's adding a new wing. The last time I attended a NAMM Show, participation was falling off due to the rise of the www as a primary means of product introduction.

I was hoping that would be a temporary glitch and that participants would see that there are enough other benefits to appearing in the industry's largest trade show.

Welcome! As mentioned, this topic has been discussed ad absurdum in the old forum.

If you can work out how Google can give away their Chrome browser for free, Google Drive for free, Google Voice for free, GMail for free, all they give away for free, and yet become one of the richest corporations in the world, then you'll have solved the puzzle.

1 hour ago, Misha said:

2) Why "load balancing" was not set by default in Cakewalk, as it seems to make more sense of having it checked for efficiency...?

I guess the essence of my question is related to Cakewalk specifically.  Does it use core efficiently or "just makes use of them".  

speed vs cores

Now that I've delved more deeply into performance settings in Cakewalk and Windows 10, your #2 question puzzles me as well, not only for that, but for a couple of other settings as well. There are buffer settings that would seem to have very little "cost" in terms of memory that result in smoother performance. Memory was once a rarer commodity so I suspect that some default settings might need to be updated.

When I saw the option for plug-in load balancing, I found it difficult to envision a condition where I wouldn't want that enabled. A few ExtraPlugInBufs seemed to make my system breathe easier.

One big thing to consider that I see people failing to ask a lot of time in these discussions is what type of recording you are doing, audio or soft synth? That really affects resource usage.

You can get a rough idea of how Cakewalk is using cores on your current system by using Task Manager and Resource Monitor. Right click on your "start menu" button and run Task Manager, then click on the Performance tab, then down at the bottom, click on Resource Monitor, and it will launch a tool that will show you how busy each of your cores are. Click on the CPU tab.

I couldn't tell from the screencap if it was part of a group, but if it's part of a group, and the group is selected, you won't get the Rename command in the context menu.

23 hours ago, John said:

My advice is a little Ozone goes a long way.  When using it restraint is the key. 

Yea, lest doom prevail. Is that not the way with all processors of signal, good Sir John?

Even the Fader of Level and the Pot of Pan hold danger for those who wield them unwisely!

It may have gotten buried in there, but my point, as a user of Ozone and admirer of iZotope's technology was that "Ozone" is a suite of well-integrated tools with a bunch of presets and a couple of wizards.

It's not a magic wand, there's no knob for "more Ozone" and "less Ozone," nor is it a Pandora's Box of horrors that can somehow irreparably ruin an otherwise perfect mix

Surely a determined fool could do as much harm to a mix armed with no more than ProChannel modules and the Boost11? I was ruining mixes long before I got a license for Ozone, I can tell you that. Pull them faders down!

In my lowly version of Ozone, Elements, all I get is the limiter, the spatializer, and the EQ.

My guess is that it's their Maximizer  (the limiter) that is the cause for concern and calls for restraint. Indeed, that's the element that I find myself tuning most of all, as it's most critical.

When I have run the Mastering Assistant, I usually liked its suggestions for the EQ (I've run it and had it come out almost flat, haw yeah), but I like to putz with the Maximizer and the Imager. The wizard never adds any Imager.

Maximizer has some settings that I like to tune that deal with transient handling and stereo independence as well as our friend loudness. I've found that it's not too outrageous about loudness though. Maybe earlier versions got a bad rap (no pun).

Those who fear the Ozone may be pleased/surprised/unsurprised to know that 8 Standard and Advanced come with a module that I would love to have that's dedicated to referencing your mix against other tracks. Typical of iZotope's stuff, it's got a next-level outside the box idea or two.

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/products/ozone/track-referencing-in-ozone-8-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it.html

17 hours ago, Base 57 said:

You must not have seen the deals forum yesterday.  You were waiting by the wrong hole, like a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Oh noooooo!

Actually, Larry is the mouse hole aggregator. Good reminder to keep an eye on him.

It'll be around when it's around. And when it is, He Who Seems To Never Sleep will no doubt be on it.

I take this as a good sign. If they're loss-leadering it at B&H, then their loss-leader program must be paying off for them, and they'll be keeping it up.

The challenge is getting to be finding $1-$5 things to buy at Pluginboutique. I already own most of the Soundspot FX (much of which is actually pretty useful stuff, nice GUI's) and have multiple licenses for Hybrid 3 and Vacuum Pro.

On 1/24/2019 at 8:50 AM, chris.r said:

That's because you can unmute it any time during playback and most probably be wanting to hear the immediate effect. To stop streaming a track you will have to archive it.

Thanks. Archiving. Time for me to hit the manual. I've seen archiving referred to. That's the thing I do with takes that I want to keep around in the project for comping, but have no immediate use for....got it.

This is why I love forums. I didn't even know Cakewalk could Zoom at Cursor. I also didn't know about being able to zoom with the mouse wheel. So handy!

Now, because of Chris grousing about a bug, I will be zipping around at twice the speed.

I didn't know about the option because of one of my grouses, which is that settings and options and preferences are spread out all over the place, and I have not been able, after 9 months of using the program, been able to find anywhere in the documentation that lists all the options in one place.

Mouse wheel action is kind of sad around here because I prefer a Trackman Marble for pointing, but there are so many cool things that one can do with a wheel that I've sidelined my beloved Marble until I can sort out the issue of being able to use the ball as a wheel. Some clever lad has come up with a utility that allows one to hold one of the small buttons and wheel with the ball, but I haven't set it up yet.

First let me say that this is absolutely correct, your mastering efforts, nay, ALL your efforts are doomed. As a matter of fact, his efforts, my efforts, and the efforts of everyone reading this are doomed. These words mock us much like the twin trunkless legs of Ozymandias, standing 30' tall in the desert, the lone and level sands stretching far and wide with nothing else around but these words on a pedestal beneath, "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

But Ozymandias of Egypt did not have a copy of RoomEQWizard 5.0.

Nor a copy of Ozone 8 Advanced, which you apparently do, if you're discussing CODEC Preview, you lucky dog.

Merry Xmas indeed. I only have Ozone Elements 8, and I kind of hate it in a way, because I had just gotten to the point where I was really liking the way my masters sounded, with all my plug-ins tuned just right, and then Pluginboutique put it on sale for something in the neighborhood of $30 and I couldn't resist.

And I tried it on a song that I had just gone back and applied my newly-acquired mastering wisdom to, slapped it right on the Master bus and started going through the preset collection and was like....oh no. This thing. Oh no. And I decided to try their wizard, whatever it's called, that analyzes a bit of your song and twiddles the knobs a pops out a suggestion, and I think I did a literal🤦‍♀️.

Because a lot of them sounded really good, like as good or better than what had taken me months of struggling and sounding like refried poo and being discouraged and thinking that I was never going to "get" this whole mixing thing (especially figuring out how to set up a compressor). And just as I had crested the hill and was feeling confident, along comes this Lite version of a mastering suite that's somewhat derided for having autopilot features anyway, and lo and behold, it does, and they work.

Of course, I've made my peace, the settings it suggests are that, suggestions, and I always have to adjust them, and it's never the only thing in my mastering chain, and I can master just fine without it, thanks. I treat it as a collection of very nice-sounding plug-ins with some very nice presets and good-looking UI's. It's also great for "quickie mixes" for when I've just recorded a jam with friends and everyone wants to hear a playback and I have the length of one joint on the porch to make a rough mix.

To get to your issue: I think what you're asking is how to properly use Ozone Advanced as a mastering suite in conjunction with Cakewalk? Specifically where to apply the dithering. Ozone's has some cool dithering algorithms and you want to try theirs when doing your MP3 and AAC and FLAC renders.

Dithering is just this fancy noise that is added to your audio so that the conversion from 24 to 16 doesn't leave weird sounds in it. It only matters during that conversion process. If we were recording at 44.1/24 and rendering to the same, no dithering need to apply. But since MP3's and CD's are 16-bit, we must dither about.

Since Advanced comes in both standalone and plug-in forms, you don't have to do it the way you did, doing all your mixing in Cakewalk, then exporting a WAV file, importing it back into Cakewalk with Ozone on the Master bus and exporting it again. You have a couple of choices.

1. You may export your original mix as a WAV from Cakewalk, then load it into the standalone Ozone 8 and do all your mastering work in there, either using only the modules that come with Ozone or including 3rd-party ones, as Ozone 8 Advanced supports that, too. Then you can render to the file formats you want directly from Ozone, using the dithering and CODECS that they supply.

So Export from Cakewalk at whatever you Rate/Depth you record, let's say 44,100/24bit. Apply no dithering. Then load that file into the standalone Ozone 8 Advanced and have at it. When seasoned to taste, export away. It is at that point ye shall apply thine dithre.

2. You may do as you said you did earlier and proceed as in 1, except after you export the WAV file, start a new project in Cakewalk, install Ozone as a plug-in on the Master bus of Cakewalk and import the WAV file back in. Once you have something you want to pop out, set Ozone's dithering options, then Export/Audio from Cakewalk's menu, choosing "None" in the dialog for Dithering, because your audio is already going to have the dithering sprinkled on it before it gets to that stage.

Then you can extrude the usual file formats you wish right from Cakewalk.

About that last: my workflow may be different from others', but when I am finished with mixing and mastering (which I do by myself, of my own material, ITB, which breaks a bunch of rules right there and could earn me a coolerful of Haterade dumped on my head) I export one single file from the mastering program in a lossless format, either WAV or FLAC.

That lossless file gets a treatment from MP3Tag, which I use to embed tagging information such as artist, song title, copyright, year, genre, album, etc. I also embed whether the file is a rough mix, because those have a way of "getting into the wild" by being sent to significant others, friends, etc. and the tagging can make that easier to see if it shows up on the player's screen as "Song for Babs-Rough Mix 1."

Then for creation of various compressed format distribution files, I use an external program called MediaHuman where I have profiles set up for the various formats I want to distribute. These days I keep it to FLAC and higher-rate AAC. Everybody's phones and players seem to support M4A files and the quality seems best to me of the lossy formats. Usually if someone gives me their stuff in M4A format it's a sign that they are paying a little closer attention.

As far as people on forums hatin' on Ozone, they're probably envious. It's a box of really top-notch tools that work well together, and a wizard that you can use if you choose or not, and a bunch of presets like every other processor has, and you are fortunate to have the opportunity to be working with such a suite. I think with Advanced you can even use the FX as individual plug-ins, and I would surely do so if I were able with the Elements Suites I have, which are Ozone and Neutron. The only down side of using them is the latency they introduce during tracking, and they do represent a suite's worth of processor resources.

I'm waiting like a cat at a mousehole for Pluginboutique to let loose with a deal on RX Elements.

I've learned much from having Ozone Elements around and running the wizard and seeing what it comes up with, seeing if I like it or not, checking the results. Heck, if you apply a preset or run the Assistant and find that the Maximizer squashes your mix too much, nobody forces you to keep the results. Go in and click on it and pull back on the slider and un-squash it, just as you would if you had a buddy who was an Oasis fan who kept trying to get you to brickwall everything. Pitfall avoided.

What happened is that while BandLab does support Cakewalk, apparently "support@cakewalk.com" is a broken email address and therefore not a good way to contact them.

Looks like the way to get help from the company is via https://help.cakewalk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new instead of support@cakewalk.com

Support@cakewalk.com is referred to several times on BandLab-owned websites as being a valid way to contact support for Cakewalk, so they should either get rid of that or make it a valid means of contact.

I'm still here, and my system has settled down and gotten perkier. I'd say, just offhand, that right now it's almost back to where it was under Windows 7.

That was a Windows 7 system that had been tuned and tweaked for years to wring every last cycle and millisecond of performance out of it, so the contrast was going to be stark.

The draggy system issue was down to a combination of things. It got me to roll up my sleeves and re-familiarize myself with system monitoring tools that allowed me to find out what was going on, such as certain processes that were flogging my hard drive while Cakewalk was trying to stream audio from it, services that were running that I didn't want, the usual cruft. Windows 10 has a whole bunch of stuff to turn off. XBox things, Game Mode, all these things I learned about.

It didn't like my graphics card at first so I was relegated to using the onboard HD4000 instead of my Quadro.

My wireless Logitech mouse also chose this time to start getting some kind of interference on its frequency, so I thought for a while that I was having other UI responsiveness problems that turned out to be coincidental.

I put the nVidia Quadro FX580 back in and it's currently running both my monitors, and I've got my fingers crossed. The video looks so much better with this thing. I even at one point got Windows 10 to permit me to run one monitor from the nVidia and the other monitor from the HD4000, not that I want to keep it that way. I want to have the dedicated graphics card doing its job.

The transport lag issue is still a thing with the Cakewalk. I've been working it, analyzing it with Resource Monitor. I've always had issues with the audio engine being sensitive to moving the Loop Markers around. If I move a Loop Marker around a few times, the engine will fall over. It seems to be related to spikes in disk usage, but I can't see anything odd there, my project disk is a SATA 7200 that's separate from the system drive, so there are not data bottlenecks in the setup.

And no, it's not because of my Firepods, I have 3 systems and they all do the same thing. One uses an M-Audio Firewire Audiophile and the other its onboard Realtek.

Cakewalk seems to stream audio files even when the Clips and Take Lanes that refer to the audio files are muted (as in currently unused takes and clips), and I'm not sure if that's right. Seems like it should leave them alone.

I need to bring it to the devs, who have their attention on the NAMM Show right now.

Good heavens. When did computer users become such nervous nellies? I guess it was the onset of GUI's. This idea that "Microsoft didn't include a big colored button and a Help file to tell me how to do it so it must be a license violation or downright immoral." When I first got a computer, the only way to install things, even run them, even use them, was via a command shell just like the one I used to enable the Group Policy Editor that was already installed on my Windows 10 Home system.

Windows 10 Home comes with a feature, and I can turn the feature on or off if I want, even if Microsoft doesn't give me a nice Fisher-Price GUI to do so. There are certain features of Cakewalk that require editing of a raw text file to enable and configure. Having to enable or install features from a command shell happens all the time in other OSes such as Linux.

I know of nothing in my Windows 10 Home license that says I mustn't enable Group Policy Editor nor disable realtime Defender scanning. If anyone can cite language that states otherwise, I will stand corrected.

Besides, I think people should "walk on the wild side" every once in a while.

Back when upholstery had those tags that said "not to be removed under penalty of law," I used to just rip them right off and gleefully toss them in the trash. I got away with it, too. They never caught me. I don't know if there's a statute of limitations on that, and you know what, I don't care. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time, and I'm prepared to pull a stretch for the tag-rippin' I did in my youth. I had my fun.

Professional-looking. Eager to try it out.

At this point I have about zero interest in gaming. I'm not saying that won't ever change, but I guess if it does, I can always save up and buy a swoopamatic 3-D card.

One thing that has always befuddled me is how the graphics card companies sell cards of similar specs and architecture as "workstation" cards or "gaming" cards, but the "workstation" version will be 5-10X the price.

I guess what I want for my uses, DAW, video, photo editing, and general desktop, is a solid workstation card, and it doesn't need to be anything magic. The HD4000 built into my chipset works fine, but the quality of the graphics is just dire. Blurry. Fuzzy and indistinct compared to the AMD on my other workstation and the nVidia in my notebook.

I'll give the Quadro FX 580 another chance before I buy another card. Now that TELEMETRY!!!! has had a chance to work its mysterious magic, maybe it will work, who knows. It was an optional upgrade to the Optiplex when it was new, so it should be compatible with the hardware. It worked a treat under Windows 7, I even had one monitor plugged into the HD4000 and the other into the Quadro at one point just to see if it would work, and it did.

As far as preamps go, I'm kinda surprised to see all this weenie waggin' over built-in ones.

I thought that the "common wisdom" was that you never track anything critical with just the interface's built-in preamps. If you don't stick a Manley or a boutique clone of a Neve strip or something in front of it you might as well not even bother, right? Something with tubes, a transformer, preferably both?

Of course, that's also "common wisdom" about stock plug-ins, and Cakewalk comes with such good-sounding ones that I can't resist using them!

I do hope to one day build a nice mic preamp for tracking vocals. I assembled one for a client from a kit and the thing sounded amazing. Transformer and JFETs.

3 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

It isn't about the ability to technically playback 24bit it is if someone has the equipment to render and reveal those differences.  Your phones doesn't have a high resolution output.  Stock car speakers are no where close.  And the list goes on.

One would think so, I know, I know. And go ahead and write me off as an audiophool for what I'm about to claim, or say that it's placebo effect, BUT.

I was setting up VLC Player on this plastic RCA tablet I got at Wal-Mart for $40 that has one built-in speaker for playback, and fiddling around with the deep settings and found this one that said OpenSL ES, and I don't even know what that means. But I selected it, and restarted the playback, and the difference in what came out of this ridiculous recycled cigarette pack wrapper cone 1.5" speaker, not to mention what has to be a pretty nasty DAC wasn't even subtle. Clearer, better transients, more intelligible, rounder and tighter bass....

Speaking of which, I've also been dismayed to notice differences in playback quality between different music players on the danged thing. This is using my cheap bedroom Sony headphones. Best so far is Black Player.

All I can figure is that they are just really good at getting those ones and zeroes to the DAC in an orderly fashion without doing anything to them on the way and that the other players I tried are less so. I am a skeptical person and believe me I wish that it were not this way, I would much prefer to have listened and come to the conclusion that all FLAC's played on my $40 RCA tablet into my $20 Sony headphones sounded just the same through any music player, especially that VLC couldn't be topped.

Long way to get there, but my point was that the "bottleneck" idea doesn't apply to audio. A well-played, well-recorded, well-mixed, and well-mastered record is still going to sound better through the tin(n)iest little speaker. The Beatles took over the world 55 years ago making records that sounded great through really crappy reproduction equipment. Japanese transistor radios, when Japan's manufacturing quality was, in general, worse than China's is today.

"Nights in White Satin" blew me away on my friend's clock radio in 1972 hearing those soaring strings and wailing backing chorus. This all came across on a single nasty 3" speaker in a plastic enclosure that also contained an electric clock mechanism. I know that the fact that the Moodies' recording was so good to begin with made a difference, even down to using great tube mics to capture the vocals.

Josephine Blowsephine is happy editing video with Vaguest 7, which runs just fine on her system. Tragix offers her a free upgrade to Vaguest 10, telling her that it will run just as well on her system, but be more secure and have more features, and besides, they are ending support for Vaguest 7.

Josephine says what the heck and downloads the patch that will upgrade her system to Vaguest 10 and fires it up with some anticipation.

Only she finds that it doesn't run just as well on her system, it's incompatible with one of her video cards and weirdest of all, her housemate and kids start complaining that Netflix and Amazon Prime aren't streaming very well, although her flat has Gigabit fiber.

Josephine hits Google and finds out that Vaguest 10 has a feature where if it finds a fast enough Internet connection, it will go out and attempt to form a processing farm with other Vaguest 10 systems to share rendering duties. She also finds out that Vaguest Pro 10 has an extra admin control panel that allows the user to disable this feature, while plain Vaguest 10 does not.

She also finds a procedure that will allow her to enable the extra admin control panel on the plain Vaguest 10 edition.

She performs the procedure, enables the control panel and uses it to turn off the new, unwanted feature that is messing up her system and preventing her from getting full enjoyment and use from the software.

Should she feel "relieved," "3733t3," "legit," or "2legit2quit?"

Or is it better if she works on being less concerned with how she should feel and just feels?

6 hours ago, Steev said:

Ever use www.pricewatch.com  to search for the best deals available? It's especially good for searching for new parts and peripherals for matching up aging computers. I found several very good super cheap deals in both PCI and PCIe 16x formats. 

Most impressive for immediate purchase  AMD FirePro V3900 actually packs a decent amount whoop for $25 with free shipping from AccendTech.  AMD FirePro V3900 1GB DDR3 DVI DisplayPort PCI-Express Graphics Video Card  manufactured by ATI. 

 I believe this V3900 is selling for 10x less then I paid for it back in the day when it was new tech.

Requires PCIe 16x slot.. If you don't have a PCIe 16x slot, skip down to Requires PCI slot

This was a very decent entry level video editing card back in the day, certainly not anymore with computers with newer PCIe 16x v3 spec, but for older aging machines it's VERY HIGH TECH! And  it still can outperform any onboard video chips  and renders video at least 5x-10x faster.

I actually owned and installed a V3900 as an upgrade from an nVidea that shipped with it, specifically for video editing with Sony Vegas Pro 4 with my 2012 Dell Opiplex which was upgraded from Windows Vista to Win 7 to Win 10 and still being used today by Niece Emily.

12-sided Dude! Now we're talkin! I didn't know that Pricewatch was still around. Party like it's 1999.

Buying graphics cards for my trailing-edge systems has been my achilles heel. It's always about "will it play Halo?"

I, too am a Vegas baby, still light up my copy of 10 Pro from time to time, so if you say that this pup works a treat with Emily's Optiplex and Vegas and Cakewalk....this info is GOLD.

My main system is an Optiplex 7010. It has a Gen 2 Pci-e slot for a video card. I need to drive a monitor with a DVI port and a Display Port and another monitor with an HDMI port, so the card you showed me would work with my Display Port to HDMI adaptor.

I lean toward nVidia cards rather than AMD because of past troubles with Mixcraft and general lore in the DAW world. However, if you have empirical first-hand knowledge, that counts for a great deal with me.