Starship Krupa

"Wasted," though? I view it as part of my learning process, also kissing frogs. Heck, if I got an hour or two of fun fiddling around with something I paid $10 for, I consider that a deal. A couple of days ago, I took my friend to our favorite burger joint. 2 sandwiches, large fries, 2 regular drinks: $36. (and it literally ends up in the toilet!)

Carowinds has some great rides, beautiful park (at least 45 years ago when I went), but this speaks more toward lax inspections by park personnel than it does anything else. Note that the design was sound enough to have that joint fail and still run all those trains every day without the track coming down. The joint was under compression and when it deformed, the top of the pole shifted to that beam. Not sure that was intentional by the designers, but either way, it's good "if this fails, what will happen?" What is inexcusable is that park operations and maintenance missed it. When I was an operations supervisor at a theme park 43 years ago, our coaster and flume operators came in an hour early every day to walk the length of the tracks for visual inspection. Any anomaly was to be reported. If any ride started making an unusual noise, it was to be reported. Considering how many of our flat rides were friggin' retired touring carny rides, we certainly needed to be vigilant. This should have been caught within 24 hours of a crack first being visible, before it had a chance to become a break. What this implies is that the rest of the rides at Carowinds are now in question, and if I were the local authorities, I'd get some inspectors out there now to check everything. Including and especially an audit of the park's internal inspection practices and ride operator training. (I know that modern looping coasters can't have their entire tracks "walked," but there are things like scopes and cameras that can be used instead)

I wouldn't do that on the notion that they're somehow inherently dangerous. If it triggers stuff like claustrophobia (which it does in me, to a degree), then yeah. The human brain is wired to ascribe way too much danger to activities based on single anecdotes. This makes perfect evolutionary sense: if the tribe finds out that Zorg was killed by a crocodile in the local river, and heeds that as a warning, better rate of survival. Things like this make the news because they happen so infrequently. Around 100 people died that day in automobile accidents in the US. How many people have ever died in mini subs? Fatal car crashes are common, so not news unless a famous person is involved. Stay the hell away from experimental, uncertified small submersibles that don't get rigorously inspected between trips, for sure. Made of laminates and titanium? Not a matter of whether but when. So many craft have been lost or crippled due to undetected fractures and delamination that came about after too many trips without inspection. Anyone who's ever had an aging skateboard deck break in half can understand this principle: stiff materials can only take so much flexing before they fail.

Not "better." As for whether they sound different, potentially, yes, due to different D/A converters and associated analog circuitry downstream. In this situation, trust your ears. Listen to both. If you prefer one over the other, then, yes, one is better (for you) than the other.

The ones they give you free for creating an account, especially bx_Masterdesk Classic. After that, the under-$20 ones you can get for free in the MEGA sales with 3 days in a row of no-limit voucher codes. Depending on their tastes, that covers a wide swath of the Unfiltered Audio line as well as plenty of Brainworx goodies like SPL Vitalizer and elysia mpressor.

Wow, cool that I recognize so many of the people in that topic. I think I post a lot on the forum, but dang, Ed has almost as many posts as he does audio software packages! It's good when the prolific ones are people that I like. ☺

Sure. You're trying to run very old software on a modern computer system. 🤨 While I do understand "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," at some point any given version of a computer program gets left behind, becomes no longer supported (in the form of updates to be compatible with newer OSes, peer support like you're asking for now, etc.). Past about 5 years, the time bomb starts ticking pretty loudly. At 18 years, you're lucky that it will even run on Windows 10. It's going to stop working entirely, eventually. At that point, whether you like it or not, you're going to need to get a program that will run on your computer. Cakewalk by BandLab is still free to download and use, and will remain free to use. It's about to be frozen, but it's at least designed to be compatible with Windows 10 and 11. It can open your Home Studio projects, and likely not have a problem with your .INS file. If it does have trouble with your .INS file, you can ask for help here and get more and more helpful responses.

Yes. MAutoDynamicEQ can do everything that MEQualizer can, and a whole lot more. But what if you don't need the "whole lot more" for a simple EQ task? The "whole lot more" stuff is just distracting. For me, the automatic stuff, resonance finding, matching, etc., that's specialized. Great to have but not used on every project. MEQualizer is powerful. The filter types and slopes and harmonics, the analyzer, the automatic band soloing, on and on.

Hence my "chances are." No, it's not always true, for the reasons you mention, but it's something to try that increases the chance of success. Very useful to have around, I should really get one. It's a better idea than trying to get the new computer to read floppies from the old one. Who knows, though, if the laptop's internal drive can no longer read the floppies, a new one might.🤪

You're not stupid, but you're unusual. People don't tend to read manuals. They get in a big hurry to play with their new toys and don't want (or think) to sit down and read the manual. I was born in 1961 and it was that way then and has certainly not improved since then. I was a technically-competent kid who liked to help people sort things out, and 9 times out of 10 the people having trouble hadn't cracked the manual. Manufacturers are complicit in the fact that people tend not to read manuals. Everything is touted as being plug and play, a breeze to set up, no hassles. Apple doesn't ship manuals with iOS products. Some people just don't do well with manuals, it starts to look like a confusing blur to them especially once their anxiety level goes up. Not all manuals are well-written. No amount of kvetching and browbeating on our part is going to change that. It's getting exasperated over something that we can't change. The only hope is that gentle suggestions that the information should be in the product instructions will be heeded and shown to be helpful. As regards having Cakewalk Sonar/Next specific cheat sheets for getting hardware to work with the software is a good idea. As you yourself said, downloading and installing the latest driver from the mfrs' website is step one. There are Cakewalk-specific issues that can come up, even with just interfaces. And those aren't going to be in the hardware's manual. Cakewalk by BandLab (and I'm sure its successor, Cakewalk Sonar) unfortunately (IMO) supports too many driver modes. 32-bit MME has no place being a selection. Nor does WDM/KS. They're just confusing. ASIO, WASAPI Exclusive, WASAPI Shared are all that need to be there. When someone installs a MAGIX or Steinberg program, or the full Realtek driver package and gets unwanted ASIO drivers (which can happen before they get their new interface), things can go to hell for them. Cakewalk for some reason just loves to grab those crappy drivers, after which you can't change back to the interface's native ASIO driver until you disable the outputs under Devices. I've had to do this myself. That ain't in the interface's manual, and I'm not even sure it's in the Cakewalk Reference Guide. It might be helpful to have a list, for beginners, of community-recommended interfaces. We recently discovered that M-Audio sells one for $50 that has full ASIO support. I consider that the price of entry for recording audio. The bottom rung. Well, that and a mic or instrument. There's no reason to waste time with those low-end Behringer ones that don't have ASIO drivers. But if someone happens to have one, with no replacement in sight, they should know that running it in WASAPI Exclusive is the preferred way.

Certainly one of the better ones I've participated in over the decades. And the best one for a product.

Early on, MeldaProduction came out with MDynamics, which was intended to be The One Dynamics Processor To Rule Them All. Get that and you'll never need another compressor, gate, limiter, expander, whatever. Which fits with Vojtech's design philosophies. A limiter is the same thing as a compressor with an infinity ratio, so why separate them? The answer is that there is usability value in reducing complexity (also, you can sell FX to people who don't have the budget for MDynamics). Despite the fact that their features are a subset of MDynamics', with the same underlying code, I use MCompressor and MLimiterX more often than I use MDynamics. MDynamics is just too huge for me to get my head around (for now). Vojtech has said that he uses MLimiterX when mixing/mastering, which is a pretty good endorsement.

Ah. Now that I think of it, back in the first half of the 90's, laptops didn't come with ethernet built in. You'd get an ethernet PCMCIA card, if your laptop even had a PCMCIA slot. Then they grew internal modems, which stuck for about 15 years, then ethernet, which seems to still be with us, then built-in wi-fi. Chances are that if your floppies can be read by the laptop's floppy drive, they can be read by an external floppy drive. If not, there are various strategies to help with floppies that can be read by one system and not another. One is to format the floppy in the target system. Then see if it's read/writable in the old system, in which case you can copy your files to the laptop's HD and then to the newly formatted disk(s).

What OS is on this laptop? If it's at least Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and it can connect to your home network, you may be able to transfer the files via Windows networking. The newer the OS (Windows 95, 98, XP), the better your chances.

It's not, actually. There are so many free offerings of plug-ins that it's like trying to drink from a fire hose. This particular promotional giveaway was bungled. And kinda weird, really. Why did they think they'd need to entice people with free goods so that they would participate in a class with Alan Parsons? The way it went for me was that I registered for it on the day it was announced and heard nothing further. I had forgotten the date, so a reminder email would have been nice.

So this deal is actually kinda half-fast?

My math on Melda's deals is notoriously unreliable (but usually my calculations come out higher than what they actually are). So thanks for the clarification.

Larry already posted this as part of a larger list of VSTBuzz deals, but I think it warrants its own topic. https://vstbuzz.com/deals/80-off-mlimiterx-by-meldaproduction/ This is one of those cases where getting the plug-in at a deep discount can pay off when the bundle sales come around. Melda licenses purchased from retailers are credited at 50% of list when applied to purchases of bundles that include that plug-in. MLimiterX is part of the MEssentialsFX, MMixingFX, and MMasteringFX bundles, so if you're interested in any of those, a license for it's good for $54 off. Couple that with one of their periodic 50% off bundles/everything sales, and you can get a nice collection of processors for little money. Not incidentally, out of all of the limiters in my collection. MLimiterX is my go-to mastering limiter. It's a worthy purchase whether you intend to leverage to a bundle or not. Caveat: if you've never bought anything from MeldaProduction before, this will qualify as a first purchase, which means that you'll no longer be able to use someone else's referral code to get a 20% new buyer discount.

This. The issue is the presence of the Realtek ASIO driver. A quick trip to the registry and all is well. Your system can then be set up to play Windows sounds like YouTube and whatever through the onboard chip and you will still have the ASIO functionality with the mixer. Also, in order to switch between two ASIO drivers present on a system, you must first uncheck all of the Audio Devices that pertain to the unwanted ASIO driver.

I think that's no longer strictly true, as a few of the newer synths that they have come out with seem to be using the underlying technology of Hybrid and Vacuum. They don't seem to have come up with anything like XPand! yet, though.

I wonder if the "save your keyboard binding in a file and delete all lines in the file which contain: Kx00530B, then load that keyboard binding file" fix that the OP tried also fixed this issue.

Therefore not much incentive to work around its bugs.

I'm very fond of Hybrid 3. For arpeggiator-driven 90's ambient kinds of stuff, it's my most inspiring synth, and I have MASSIVE and Chromaphone 3. Hybrid 3 has the best arp sounds. It has 2 arpeggiators that can be used simultaneously. Well worth $10, IMO. Xpand! 2 is also my favorite general purpose ROMpler. Vacuum Pro is another favorite. The only drawbacks I've ever experienced with AIR's synths is the lack of a way to mark "favorite" in the patch browser, but I can use the DAW's native preset system to get around that. As far as technical issues, I've never experienced any problems with AIR synths, not a single one. They are light on resource use compared to other synths out there.

They're usually trying to sell more of them I think. Likely very few. Yes. (apologies, I'm watching this freaking hilarious mockumentary show on Netflix called Crunk on Earth that features a hilariously literal-minded character covering human history in 5 30-minute installments. "So how long were the first flights? "Typically on the order of just a few hundred feet." "Well they could have walked that....")

Maybe we could compile a list of most-given-away commercial licenses. Quadravox, iZotope Elements (in its various forms), Ableton Live! Lite, A|A|S Sessions (in its various forms)....