Starship Krupa

4 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

If this is the "solution", there's a problem with the CPU (as mounted).

You want the cooler surface to be making best contact possible.

I'm not worried about starting it up with the mobo horizontal and the cooler loosened a notch, as a troubleshooting step.

If it suddenly comes to life as a result of that test, it would suggest that there might be an issue with the cooler. Could've gotten damaged in shipping, might not have been installed correctly in the first place.

I'm at the straw-clutching phase anyway. Anything other than the same spin up/spin down would be welcome.

43 minutes ago, Jim Roseberry said:

Power spin up/down in endless loop is usually either power-supply, motherboard, or (less often) video card.

As was suggested, I'd disconnect power, pull the CMOS battery for 12+ seconds, then reinsert the battery and try booting.

This will reset the BIOS.

The king has spoken!

Well, let's see. The power supply is a 6 month old EVGA 500W that was powering my current daily driver until I found a Corsair RM650X on CL for $50. I've tried two video cards, both of which have functioned well in other systems: a GTX550Ti and a GT 720 (in case it was a matter of too much power draw).

I have pulled the battery, used the reset BIOS jumper, pressed the reset BIOS button on the mobo, and even flipped the switch to invoke the backup BIOS. Same behavior.

The only things I have yet to try are swapping out the PSU (the only other one I have available is in my daily driver, so pain) backing off on the Noctua's clamp screws and swapping the CPU out for the 6800X.

Sure would like to know what the previous owner did to get past this issue when he had it.

I'm pricing LGA 2011-V3 motherboards on eBay. ?

Kinda pricey for my budget, but Microsoft has helped out by ensuring that Windows 11 won't install.

Looks like most of them are in the RFK category.

On 1/16/2023 at 10:33 AM, bitflipper said:

Maybe I'm still in mourning over Neil Peart, but it does seem that drummers generally don't enjoy long longevity.

Maybe it's just Canadian drummers? Well, okay, I guess Keith Moon and John Bonham....

However, Jimi H., Janis J., Jim M., Amy W., Minnie R., Bon S., John L., Kurt C., Hank W., Buddy H., Richie V., Big B., Tupac S., Biggie S., Nick D., Freddie M., Ronnie V., Cassie G. Sam C., Jim R., Kyu S. and Judy G. made the case that singers can check out pretty early.

Neil and Robbie beat Judy Garland by 20 years. She's the geezer in the bunch at age 47. Of the rest of them, Minnie Riperton, Sam Cooke, John Lennon, Jim Reeves and Kyu Sakamoto were the only ones who even made it out of their 20's.

21 singers, and none of them made it to 50! Only two of them (Minnie and Freddie) died of natural causes. Of the rest, 7 of them died in plane crashes on the way to gigs, and with the rest, it was drugs and/or violence.

Yeah, I know, I'm about to turn 62, and I kinda hope that I've got more than 5 years left in this theme park we call "life," but all of those I listed crammed a LOT of living into their time. Well, except maybe Nick Drake ?, but if you're trying for a lasting legacy, Nicky baby knocked that one out of the park.

On 1/28/2023 at 11:15 AM, kitekrazy said:

Reapers shame was lack of documentation when it came out.

Wasn't the first manual that came out the product of one (or more) users?

I remember going over the thing desperately searching for what I needed to do to start it recording audio.

IIRC, you have to create a clip before you start recording, which is so unlike any other DAW I've used it never occurred to me. Every other one creates clips after you've recorded the audio.

My usability benchmark when I was DAW shopping back in 2014 was to see how long it took to record some audio, then delete a section of it. Seems pretty straightforward, but IIRC, it took me at least 45 minutes to accomplish that small task in REAPER. Might have been even longer. By the time I finally figured it out, I wasn't too keen on trying to go further with it.

Mixcraft, on the other hand, took about a minute or two. Given its bargain price, it was clearly the way to go, so I went with a copy of Mixcraft Home Studio and upgraded it. That copy of Mixcraft Home Studio was the last piece of boxed software I ever bought.

1 minute ago, Jack Stoner said:

since it worked and if the CPU was not removed/reinstalled I wouldn't suspect bent CPU pins on this board

The first time I tried to boot it, I hadn't pulled the CPU, but the guy did of course need to remove that honkin' Noctua tower cooler in order to ship it. So I just re-pasted it and installed the cooler per the Noctua instructions, which call for some serious tightening. When I later removed the cooler and CPU to look for bent pins, the paste looked fine, no indication that there had been too much pressure.

There was no stray goop lurking around either. I guess he and I know our oats about heatsink paste.

The CPU is not the first one that he had in there, at some point he upgraded from a 6800X, which he also sent along. Haven't tried swapping that in yet, but I will before I buy a replacement motherboard.

1 hour ago, HIBI said:

I've seen a report of a similar cycle (spin up and spin down) on an ASRock Fatal1ty due to one CPU socket pin being bent. I hope this will be a hint for guessing the cause.

Googling "ASRock Fatal1ty power cycling" results in a distressing number of hits. I read that in one case, the person loosened the clamp on their cooler and it went away.

Now that you bring it up, I installed the Noctua per the factory instructions, but I haven't tried backing off a little on its clamp screws to see what happens. It could be that it's flexing the board enough that pins aren't making contact.

A thing I need to remember about CPU cooling is that while CPU's these days are tough to "burn up," insufficient cooling will result in them slowing themselves down or going into error states. I remember when that wasn't true, when people were frying their CPU's with overclocking.

13 hours ago, HIBI said:

Check for abnormalities in CPU socket pins (some pins might be deformed)

Good idea. Did it. Forgot to mention.

7 minutes ago, Jack Stoner said:

I had one of those motherboards.  "had" is the key word.    

Replace the 2032 CMOS backup battery as a first step.  This will also reset the BIOS to factory defaults.

I removed it and it measured about 2.9V, which I figured was still in the range of "good."

Also, since the original post, I made a "beep speaker." Got no beeps.

3 hours ago, Kevin Perry said:

Dirty power switch?

It happens whether I power it on with the motherboard's own power button or the one on the case.

The duty cycle on the spin up/spin down is very regular. It goes up for about 15 seconds, then down for about 2 seconds, repeat.

On 1/26/2023 at 11:36 AM, Amicus717 said:

it's hard to get any kind of performance reviews that include productivity / non-3D application use. Everything is gaming benchmarks and little else, these days

Ugh, this has long been a gripe of mine. Fortunately, in recent years, there's been some relief. I'm a stalwart nVidia user from way back, and they now even have special "creators" drivers that are supposedly optimized for NLE/DAW/raster graphic editing.

There's still no benchmark program that I know of for 2D performance, but the thing is, 4G of DDR5 and you're good to go.

You will find an enormous performance boost compared to your GT 710 no matter what you get.

In order to find recommendations, Google "best video cards for video editing."

https://justcreative.com/best-graphics-cards-for-video-editing/

They seem to think that the RX550 is a good budget choice, you can pick up an RX-580 for $121:

https://www.amazon.com/51RISC-RX-580-8GB-DisplayPort/dp/B0BNBN8HQF

My daily driver is a passively cooled GT 1030 DDR5 (that last is important, nVidia also has one with GDDR4 that should be avoided) and I can even run all of my indie games on it at ultra settings. Only has two outputs, though. As I only have two monitors, this is fine with me. I like a quiet PC, and it's the most powerful passively-cooled one out there.

Well, not a completely new build, but new to me.

Thanks to a kind donation of various components from a fellow forumite, I have the opportunity to level up once again. My current system is an i7-6700 with 32G of DDR3 (weird, because 6770's can take DDR4, but this was a bargain on CL for a hundy).

What he sent me was an ASRock Fatal1ty motherboard with an i7-6950X. Not a big level up in speed, but cores for days, which IME, DAW's and NLE's really love. Mobo also accepts DDR4. Along with this was a sweet Noctua tower cooler.

Couple of 8G RAM sticks and NVme drive from Amazon and we're ready to go. Or should be.

While waiting to pick up the case, I decided to set it up in "breadboard" configuration, where you rest the motherboard on its box, hook everything up and give it a test run. The 6950X, being built for RAW overclockable speed, has no onboard video, so I put my old GTX550Ti in.

Hit the power button on the board, and the fans (including the power supply fan) spin up and....spin back down again, then spin back up, then back down, ad infinitum. Never gets to POST, nothing on the monitor.

The power supply is a nearly new Evga 500W that was recently powering my daily driver, plenty of juice for this scenario. I have tried:

• A different video card, a GT 720 that is very light on wattage requirements.
• Checking multiple times that all power connectors are correctly connected
• Reseating the RAM.
• Reseating the CPU.
• Booting without the SSD installed.
• Booting with a single RAM stick, in various slots.
• Booting with no RAM.
• Booting with no mouse or keyboard.
• Booting with a Windows installer thumb drive.
• Disconnecting the power supply from the board and reconnecting it.
• Clearing the CMOS, both with the jumper and the CMOS-clearing button
• Flipping the switch to boot from the backup BIOS.
• Connecting extra fans to see if it didn't like booting without "case" fans.
• Letting it cycle for an hour to see if it just needed to properly enumerate everything.
• Popping the CMOS battery.
• Unplugging the power supply and letting everything sit overnight.
• Installing it in the case once it arrived.

Same behavior in all scenarios. There's a 2-digit "Dr. Debug" display on the board, but it never gets as far as lighting up.

I PM'd the guy who sent it to me and he said that at one point he had the same issue but doesn't remember how he got past it. Deep Googling reveals that while many have had the issue, they "solved" it by getting an RMA from ASRock.

My inclination was to write the board off as damaged in shipping somehow (although it was packed pretty securely), but since the donor says that he had the same issue and managed to get past it, I figure it's worth trying to bang my head against it for a while, or at least until I can locate a replacement board to go with the CPU.

The things I haven't tried are making a beep speaker to hook up and swapping in the extra i7-6800K he sent along. This is because in situations like this, it's very seldom the processor. I will try both before giving up, though.

Thinking about it, since even the PSU's fan is spinning up and back down, it looks like it's throwing juice at the board, then either not getting a "power okay" signal or getting a "dirty power" signal back from the board. I don't know how to check for this.

I can operate a DMM and oscilloscope and have both.

Suggestions, condolences welcome....

That BeQuiet case looks pretty spiffy. The old curmudgeon in my eschews that level of LED bling for a studio PC, but I have to admit that when I watch Mike Creative Sauce's videos, his system looks pretty sharp with the lighted fans.

In my recent experiences of building up a couple of PC's from spares and donated parts (one of which was a very nice Noctua tower cooler, similar to the BeQuiet), I found out that the typical classic mini tower form factor isn't wide enough for a tower cooler like that. I had to go with a mid tower.

These days, I know that there are mini-height cases that are wide enough to accommodate them, but I need a case with an externally-accessible optical drive bay, and I couldn't find one of these wider mini-towers that had an optical drive bay.

The case needs to be at least 8" wide, while the standard mini-tower is 7" wide.

In my mini-tower case, I went with a Zalman flat cooler.

Hit Alt+9 to open the Synth Rack View. You should see the rack with all of the synths in your project. Then double click on the icon of whichever synth you want to open.

Inevitable with mergers, innit? Many functions are duplicated across the companies.

Unfortunately, in my experience, it's the ones who do the actual work who tend to get cut rather than the (now redundant) middle and lower managers.

Look for the AC Dark Aqua theme, should be a ou-le of pages down in this sub forum. It uses a glow effect, as I understand glow effects.

‘I would say that a glow effect is a gradient from a dark color to a lighter one.

4 hours ago, Kevin Perry said:

This one "C:\ProgramData\VST3 Presets"

I think that may be one of the canonical locations, but I don't see it often either.

The usual one, which the PA stuff uses, is Documents\VST3 Presets\<Company Name>\<Product Name>

In that location on my system there are 6 manufacturers who have created folders, but not all of them have used them for presets. They probably created the folders to store user presets.

One of the things I dislike about the forcing-on-everyone of VST3 is that it seemed to coincide with developers dropping support for the query-the-plug-in method I described earlier.

The ones that bothered to started making their own preset managers, some of which are crap. Things like presets work better for me when I know where to find them. It took embarrassingly long for me to figure out that Plugin Alliance products actually do come with presets. I thought for years that I was on my own, which naturally didn't endear their products to me. I mean, I like their stuff okay, I just thought "no presets, ever" was something I just had to live with, kind of like "no mix control, ever" is a thing with Freakshow Industries.

On 1/23/2023 at 8:00 AM, marled said:

there is a certain thing missing in CbB for the VST3 presets

What is missing is scanning the folders where the .vstpresets reside and using them to populate the native Cakewalk preset list.

When VST3 presets are present, they are present in locations specified in Steinberg's VST3 spec. Cakewalk should be able to check those locations and populate the menu if possible (which is surely what Reaper, Studio One, et al are doing). If Cakewalk is able to display a list of valid presets in the VST3 menu, it should be able to populate the other menu with them.

As it stands, I believe there is a way for hosts to query a plug-in itself to get a list of factory presets and that is what Cakewalk does. Unfortunately, that mechanism seems to have fallen out of use by plug-in developers. When it's present, it works in both the VST2 and VST3 versions. It works in the Lindell T-100, for instance, and I think maybe the Millenium NSEQ.

I find it very handy in Cakewalk to map my tilde (~) key to Edit/Select None. When I need to deselect things, it's much easier than doing it with the mouse.

Bitflipper is right about using a limiter. The free Kilohearts Essentials collection includes a very easy to use limiter.

Also, any compressor that allows for setting a hard knee and infinite ratio basically acts as a limiter. This includes the Sonitus compressor that comes with Cakewalk, and especially the PC76 ProChannel module.

Buy it for the stand, shockmount, pop filter, give the mic to a friend who's into mic modding. Looks like a nice enough shell.

6 minutes ago, abacab said:

The kHs Pitch Shifter can do +/- 24 semitones, so range is +/- 2 octaves.

So if you bounce the track, you get 2 octaves, then apply the effect again....

https://www.meldaproduction.com/MTurboReverbLE

Wait for one of Meldaproduction's 50% off everything sales, then buy the MEssentialFX bundle using the newsletter signup credit and my 20% off referral code (MELDA1923165). That will get you a nice pile of FX, including MTurboReverbLE and MTurboDelay, for about the standard price of MTurboReverbLE.

The free Kilohearts Essentials collection includes a very good pitch shifter. I'm not sure about the range, but hey, it's free.

Check out Valhalla Supermassive. It's free.