Starship Krupa

I'm just curious: how many, while trying out PSTFO's "Bombastic Basses, wound up playing the intro to the "Dragnet Theme?" Just the facts.

When the products' look and typography is good (like Sitala's) it doesn't matter. I like the look of your dark mode there. I do like some color customization. I make electronic music where sometimes people project what's on the laptop screen so the audience can see what's going on. It's fun to be able to adjust the colors of my plug-ins. Okay, I retraced my steps in terms of how I got the error message: I have a number of projects on the older system that use Sitala. When saving drum kits or any other patches, I usually go belt-and-suspenders and save a native DAW patch in addition to using the instrument's own system. When I called this project up, I was using a kit I made using Oberheim DMX samples. The project loaded, and the name of the Cakewalk patch showed up in the Plug-in Properties UI , but of course Sitala couldn't find my custom kits on the new system. It threw up dialogs saying that it couldn't find the sample, so with each one I painstakingly found each sample and rebuilt the drum kit. This worked, as far as being able to play the song back, and I could save what I had put together using Cakewalk's native patch system, but when I went to save the restored kit using Sitala's preset/kit storing systems, it threw up this error. No amount of saving to a different name or location would pacify it. That's when I decided that if I were going to have to rebuild all of those kits, I wanted to put them together in a sampler that would allow me to save them in its native patch management system. Hello Speedrum Lite (or possibly TX16, I hadn't completely decided yet). I see now that this issue only occurs when I'm trying to save kits where I've had to tell Sitala where to find the samples for existing kits. Sitala's fine if I just start from scratch with a new kit. Now I know that Sitala's kit files include all of the samples, that would have made it easier, just copy over the directory where Sitala stores its kits. Which raises another question: let's say that for whatever reason, I save a couple of new kits in different directories, with a Save Kit As... or whatever. At this point those kits should both show up in Sitala's kit browser, right? I presume so. But then let's say I want to copy all of my Sitala kits over to another system. Sitala will probably show me the last folder I used to save a kit, but where the other(s) will be is a mystery. Is there some way to find out where Sitala thinks the various kits in its browser are? I guess I could search my entire C: drive for *.sitala files, but that seems so brute force. I believe the above illustrates Lao Tsu's famous warning that "no software survives contact with the user base."

Hey, Scott! I've liked using Sitala up to this point and it's good to know you care about us poor sampler-free Cakewalk users. Well, let's see....hmm, lets me Save As just fine in standalone....let's try it in Cakewalk. Huh, danged if it doesn't work now. I don't know what changed on my system, it's still new and I find myself having to go and crowbar the folder permissions so that I have Full Control on everything that I need to. It could be that the user that I launched Cakewalk as didn't have permission to write to wherever it needed to write to and I put a stop to that nonsense. That would be my best guess. If you tell me the file locations that Sitala writes to when saving kits, I might be able to remember if any of them were ones where I had to apply tough love. I know that at one point I had to remind C:\Program Files who is in charge (as in take ownership and give myself full control). Whenever I get one of those UAC messages saying that I need to give administrator privileges for a simple file copy or delete or replace, I just go to the top level folder and wrench on the permissions. Anyway, it works now. Cool! I do prefer Sitala over other pad samplers out there because it's easy to use. I can't even figure out how to change the note assignments to the pads in Speedrum Lite. 🙄 I hope that will be optional. I usually prefer being prompted to search for them manually when I know where I moved them to. Otherwise the program might snag a file from a temporary location and then we'd do the dance all over again. I do like it when software that relies on external audio files is smart enough to deduce the new path after I specify the location of the first missing file. 😄 Please please allow for color customization of the UI, or better still, custom skinning? I suspect that your REAPER pals might already have made that request. I'd love to get my theming hands on it, it looks like you're not using that many images to build the UI (compared to Cakewalk, I mean). It's a nice, sleek-looking UI, but the grey looks....kinda dowdy. At least, having a choice of a dark theme would be cool. Been having fun mining Reverb's collection of free vintage drum machine samples, creating Sitala kits from them. DMX, Linn, CR-78. They're good samples. P.S. I would have had far less trouble if I had been able to figure out where Sitala stores the resources for each kit. Then I could have just copied them all over and Sitala would have been none the wiser.

That's what teenagers do, innit? @PhonoBrainer, here's the site for the record company I mentioned earlier, the one named after Ulrich Schnauss' legendary album: https://www.astrangelyisolatedplace.com/ I forgot to mention that they, too have an excellent stream (complete with iOS and Android apps) called 9128. There's also a direct stream for the Winamp/MusicBee/foobar/iTunes Streaming Radio (NOT iTunes Radio 😄) oriented: https://streams.radio.co/s0aa1e6f4a/listen

I think musicians tend to be more open-minded about such things. We can appreciate the craft that goes into making music, however it's made or by whom. Maybe we see how they connect with their audience, and appreciate that that's a skill right there. Maybe a good song is just a good song, maybe a good singer is just a good singer, etc.

Windows Sticky Notes is my go-to for this. Really nice system, they can sync across multiple computers. If it could somehow sync with iOS Notes, it would be perfect.

SomaFM does tend to lean toward the electronic, but there are other genres served. Boot Liquor for new artists doing country things, Left Coast 70's for mellow Yacht Rock-y sounds, Folk Forward, Metal Detector, Thistle Radio for Celtic-influenced stuff. Looking through the list of stations....oh COOL, there's a new one called 5MD Radio that I'm digging. Kinda a bit edgier Groove Salad. The chord changes are a little darker. I am definitely submitting "Sensation" to the curator of this station. From what I know of your tastes, @PavolvsCat (is that spelling deliberate or a typo?), you might dig Radio Paradise, too:

I can vouch for the coolth of the Main Mix. It's quite Generation Jones (b. 1956-1966) friendly . I turned it on and the DJ had REM, Billy Idol, Joni Mitchell....it reminds me of listening to a really good college radio jock 30 years ago. I'll have to see if they play more contemporary artists. But I like hearing these great songs that may be covered by a layer of dust in my CD collection. In any case, I dig it, it's like classic rock for my generation rather than Boomers. I'll probably turn to other streams when I want to find something new, though.

Is the front-facing Releases section a recent addition?

If you check my OP, what I said was that my spirits fall when I'm directed to GitHub for some piece of software or other. I get that they're all about the code, but when someone is putting up binaries, why are they so hard to find? For those projects that have pre-compiled versions available, why not have a front-facing button for "download the latest binaries?" Presumably, if you go to the (not inconsiderable) trouble of compiling your software for people to use, you want them to use it? BTW, my comment about Linux and jealousy was tongue in cheek.

Same here. He's the man. Did you know there's even a record label named A Strangely Isolated Place? BTW, Hoopla Digital, which is usually free with a library card, has the original mix/master of Strangely Isolated Place which I like better than the 2019 remaster. It sounds clearer and better balanced. Dave Tipper, Chris Zippel, Telefon Tel Aviv, Candlegravity, Steve Roach, so many discoveries thanks to SomaFM.

Check Microsoft Store and the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. All of them have SomaFM players that allow you to Like songs and go directly to sites where you can purchase them. I haven't checked, but the MacOS App Store probably does, too. Whatever CODEC they're using is really good.

I don't think he would if someone had merely commented something like "whoa, your nails are pretty weird." But the comment he mentioned specifically said "gay." Which kind of implies that the commenter thinks that appearing effeminate is a negative thing. No, my man, I completely accept that you ditched him, and why. I'm paying attention to every word you write 'cause I respect your opinions. If I didn't think you were a reasonable guy worth engaging with, I wouldn't bother. I think it's important to engage with people I disagree with in a civil manner. It's good for my learning. I get that we live in difficult times and there are a lot of people virtual signaling and creating tempests in teapots, and it can get fatiguing after a while, even to people who agree with the principles behind it. I'm just saying that in this case, I think he handled it pretty well. I get tired of oversensitivity and virtue signaling as well as people claiming that someone's being "canceled" if someone else takes objection to something they said. Yes, he made a "scene." He thought it was important to address a homophobic comment. Me, I would have just deleted the comment and moved on. He let the comment stand, and my interpretation of it was that his attitude was "think what you want, but if you want to have a career in audio, your attitude may not serve you well." I thought the tone was more "really, dude?" These matters can get strange in these times. I've had friends end up in the hospital from being assaulted due to their being gay. I was also called a homophobe a couple of years ago on Facebook because of a stupid joke that I made at least a decade earlier to an amp repair client who I thought "got" that I was making fun of high school homophobic attitudes, when he thought I was copping one. Yikes. My bad, I read the situation wrong. But it goes to show how sideways things can go.

Despite our major differences in certain matters, I consider Larry a stand-up guy. Around the time that various software companies were issuing statements about solidarity with certain social movements and multiple people on this forum were spitting nails and swearing off the developers in question, I broke my own rules and weighed in on it pretty strongly. Larry never gave any sign of holding it against me. The things we have in common are more important than our differences.

It was 2012 for me. They helped me emerge from the worst episode of major depression I've ever experienced. Later, I moved from my indie rock focus back to electronica, which shift was down to my discovery of SomaFM. I have much to thank them for, and did so on my Bandcamp page.

Any idea why he bailed? His own business, of course. I'm just curious. As for linking to the forum where Larry is now active, as long as it's just to inform people of how to find him, I don't see what's wrong with that. Sure, linking to his individual posts isn't fair play; if he wanted his posts to appear here, he would post here. But it's the work of seconds to take the information and make your own post here.

Longtime fan here. I've discovered so much great stuff there. I'm also a fan of Drone Zone, Synphaera, Beat Blender, and Illinois Lounge. It's one of my musical ambitions to get a track played on a SomaFM stations. Rusty did download my track and started following me on Bandcamp, but it's not been played on SomaFM to my knowledge. I suspect he may have a wait-and-see policy for artists with only one track to their name.

Sometimes "finding other software that's not such a PITA to acquire" is a good option, too. The last time I set up a build system was when I wanted to try compiling Audacity with ASIO support. What a slog that was. I did eventually get it to build, but what a carousel of missing dependencies, confusing instructions.... And at the end of the day, I wound up with a program that I would have to rebuild all over again the next time Audacity was updated.

Cheers for sharing the direct link. My spirits always take a dive when someone recommends some free software and the link points to the top level of a Github project. Just. Tell. Me. Where. To. Download. The. BINARIES. Please. I don't want to build it myself, I'm not interested in (and wouldn't comprehend) the code, I just want to download the thingie(s) that run on my computer. A goal that I suspect is shared by 99% of the people visiting the site. Yeah, cool, your project is open source. Rock on, can I just use it please? It's almost as if Github is ashamed of hosting binaries or is deliberately obscuring them for some reason. I have spent many long minutes combing over some project's Github site, ultimately failing to figure out where it was hiding the binaries and then giving up and punching in Google searches like "Cardinal binaries download" in an effort to just be able to use the thing. That fails often enough, too. Is it that open source people tend to be into Linux and they're jealous of how easy it usually is for Windows and Mac users to obtain software? Spiteful.

Don't think I didn't see what you did there.

The freedom of speech granted by the US Constitution only says that we'll be protected against the government making laws that restrict it. It doesn't guarantee us protection from people taking objection to what we say (which itself is free speech, of course), nor does it guarantee us a platform or audience. Whytse was cool about it, I thought. He painted his fingernails, someone in the comments section expressed that they thought it was "gay," (and presumably made them uncomfortable) and Whytse asked them (paraphrasing here) if they react verbally like that to seeing a guy with nail polish on, how they expected to be able to deal with the diverse types of people you're likely to meet in the music business. He didn't "eliminate" anyone's opinion, he didn't even object to it. He never said that he wanted them to stop expressing it. He didn't say that such talk wasn't welcome, he didn't say that he was going to stop making videos or that he was even offended. I thought it was a good question: They will run into people who look (and act) out of the ordinary in the music business. Not just run into them, they might wind up working with or for them. Hair metal, goth rock, glam, country singers in full sequined regalia, black metal dudes in corpse paint and spikes....it's not good for business to be looking at clients like you think they're weirdos.

We've probably all asked the question "why is this person so offended by something that doesn't bother me at all?" Or maybe just put someone down for being offended by something that doesn't offend us. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but we do have a collective etiquette that recommends that certain opinions are best kept to oneself when in a public place or forum. My opinion on our waitress' rear end, no matter (or maybe especially) how positive and heartfelt, is not something that the entire diner needs to hear about. I suspect that the (unsolicited) "opinions" that were expressed in his direction regarding his nails included slurs referring to a specific group of people. It's not hard to imagine what form these comments might have taken. ("It makes you look like a ___, dude!") Matter of fact, I have a hard time imagining the negative comments being "neutral" in that regard. 🙄 I think that people who do creative things and who have followings tend (at least prefer) to think the best of their audience. Having homophobic (or derogatory to any group of people you sympathize with or even belong to) comments slung by members of that audience must be (literally) disillusioning. He spoke up about it. My attitude about things like that tends to be more "fsck the h8rz," but I don't know how I'd react. If you stay silent, you run the risk of giving the impression that you think talk like that in a public forum is okay, if you speak up, well, then you run the risk of people accusing you of being oversensitive. Which is the least bad option? If he had worn gold chains and a hoodie and someone had said that it made him look n-word, would his response still be oversensitive?

He mentions a phenomenon that I have yet to experience, which is the ones that are promoted via social media. I've yet to see one of those ads actually on social media; it seems like I only learn about them if Whytse decides to do a SNAKE OIL? video on one of them. I assume we all know who Whytse/White Sea Studios is, if not, get thee to YouTube. There was one a while back that he did that seemed like it might have been the first to show up, or one of the first, seemed like a knock-off of UJAM Finisher Micro. I actually think that Finisher Micro is a clever idea, if you have the nagging impression that a sound needs a little something but you can't put your finger on what, it lets you try a couple dozen common processing chains. It also has the right price: it's a free promo item. Do you all see these things being advertised? I guess they're like the "Amazing Ronco" ads that ran in cheap TV advertising slots when I was a kid. Ron Popeil. I think he started with the Popeil Pocket Fisherman, a folding 18" long plastic combo rod and reel. The ad showed someone pulling a humongous trout out of a tiny stream with one. The first "magic bullet that all the kids have to have" plug-in I was aware of was Dada Life's Sausage Fattener, which is a two-knob compressor/EQ combo. It cost $20 (or was it less?) and didn't take itself too seriously (now I see it's up to $39 and they have another single knob job called "Endless Smile." Seeing as Dada Life are prominent Meldaproduction endorsers, I suspect that their sound isn't all about these black box processors....