Shane_B.

I jumped from XP to Windows 7 then to Windows 10. As much as I loved XP, I don't miss it. No matter how lean and clean you ran your system, something got corrupted. It was general routine maintenance to format and reinstall XP about every year or so. It was as if there was a memory leak or something that slowly corrupted it over time. I've never had to do that with Windows 7 or 10. I'm still running my initial install of Windows 10 that I did from disc 6 or 7 years ago IIRC? I just let it do it's updates and it does it's thing and it's happy. There has been a couple of times the update caused some flaky behavior, but they were aware of it and resolved it very quickly. I really can't complain about Windows since 7. A friend of mine ran Sonar on Vista and ME and never had trouble. People are always worried about privacy and resist doing updates, but in my experience, if you just let it do what it wants it actually runs really well. They already have everything they need to know about you the split millisecond you get on to the net the first time from any PC on your home network. Microsoft and Google aren't the ones you really need to worry about. It's the people hiding in the shadows that steel the info they collect by way of you installing a virus or tricking you in to giving it to them that are the problem. MS and G seem to do their best to try and block those people. At least that's how I see it. IMO.

I could never get used to Reaper either. I've seen some absolutely beautiful skins for it. Some people sell custom skins for it. I couldn't tell you the last time I tried Cubase. I don't know how long it's been around, but I'd say it feels like a good 12 or more years ago since I tried it. I couldn't warm up to it at all. Studio One has morphed a lot over the years. It's heading in a one size fits all direction now. It's big claim to fame was it doesn't do midi. And it still doesn't. How it deals with midi is proprietary. But as it got more popular people started demanding more PRV type stuff and here we are. When X1 crashed on the scene (LOL) people flocked to S1 and started hounding them to be more like Sonar, only stable. And the rest is history. The one to watch now is Band In A Box. They are really making some great changes. They still have a few kinks to work out but I have no doubt they will and it will be a force to be reckoned with in a few years. Once they get the AI stuff involved and get it to manipulate samples properly the way they're trying now it's game over. If we all survive that long that is. For the first time in my life I have my doubts anyone will be around much longer . . . 🚀🚀🚀

Wednesday was a year since my last dog died. She was 16 which is almost unheard of for a lab mix. My wife and I have had dogs, cat's, and horses since we've been together. That will be 25 years this year. They're all gone now except the horse and he's 31. I sure don't miss the dog mines as I used to call them. I miss the companionship but I like my freedom more now. Maybe when my wife retires, but that's another good 15 ~ 16 years. Good luck with the new pup.

The K means it can be overclocked and has built in GPU support. This article explains all the letter meanings. I wouldn't go with anything but a K series. This has not been my experience. In order of DAW's I've used: 1.Reaper 2.Studio One 3.CbB That said, the difference that I've seen between them in recent years is almost unmeasurable. Things have changed greatly since the days of Sonar. They've all become rock solid IMO. What my preferences boil down to these days is the visual and ease of use aspects. And with that kind of thing there is no right or wrong so to speak. I will say though, out of everything I've used, Sonar 8.5PE was the last DAW that I used that fit both of those requirements. I liked what it did and I could customize it to look exactly how I wanted. Man if it only had the features current DAW's had.

That's getting closer to the point. When I said we can't compare the digital age to the pre-digital age of recording, it's not an insult to people who use electronics as instruments or the ones who sit in front of a computer and peck out every single note, instrument, and beat with a mouse. It is an observation that there is a huge difference between a group of musicians using whatever instrument they have at their disposal to perform a song as a group and a guy or two in a control room piecing together audio snippets (aka samples/VSTi's) in a computer to create a performance or editing a bad live performance to make it good. You can't compare the two. They are not the same. It's like comparing a carving done by hand to one done by a CNC machine. Both can be awesome but one doesn't carry the same feeling, weight, and respect. That said there will always be a large group of people who don't know and/or don't care and accept it and like it and that's ok too. For those of us who know the difference though and see what has happened to the music industry, it's a hard pill to swallow. I just read an article by David Crosby who recommends people don't become musicians anymore. The industry has died. I'd post a link to it but he goes off on a tangent about other crap, but he's right about most of what he said in it. "When asked what advice he'd give to the younger generation, he said: “Don’t become a musician.”

I don't have an audio interface hooked up right now so I couldn't play it but yes I'm sure it would be pulling more while running. Out of force of habit from dealing with all the crashing in Sonar back in the day, to this day, I still have the habit of freezing and bouncing everything. I get how people want a powerful enough system to run tons and tons of stuff real time, but it's not technically necessary except in a few rare cases. Systems runs so much better if they are dealing with playing back waves tracks and processing as little as possible real time. Right now I'm using the audio out through the HDMI cable and that's how I have sound for gaming. The speakers on this crappy little TV actually sound pretty good, especially compared to the speakers on that monitor I returned. It sounded like I had a cell phone on speakerphone. Absolutely horrible. But, S1 either doesn't support audio through HDMI or I don't have it set up right because I tried to use it and S1 couldn't see it.

You got me curious as to what was running and what it was using on my system so I took a look at Task Manager. Window's Defender is using 0% of my CPU when I'm at idle. I tried loading Studio One and watched Task Manager. Window's Defender upped to 4% then went back to 0%. Studio One used 3.4% loading then 0% when idle. It did seem to load a lot in to memory though. I loaded a project and it appeared to put the entire thing in to memory. It used 1.6GB but was still at 0% idle. The Brave web browser uses my GPU and it's memory. There are 3 things using the GPU on my system. The other two are generic windows runtime items. Ironically, the Nvidia background software does not run on the GPU. For a single window open in Brave it's dumping 550MB in to my GPU's memory and using the GPU's processing. It bounces up to about 3% when I'm navigating a page or opening a new tab or typing. But it falls back to 0% when idle. I've never had a system running so lean and smooth. And for so long. It was a regular occurrence to have to re-install XP. I've never had to do anything with Windows 7 or Windows 10. I'm very happy with the system I have now. I hope they change their requirements for Windows 11 and support this CPU.

Yepper. As in the case of Muskrat Love, Never Been Any Reason by Head East with that epic synth lead, Frankenstein by Edgar Winter, Rush, Beatles, and on and on.

Never cared for Muskrat Love but Cap and T were great musicians. The other two are great songs. All real musicians playing real instruments. I mean, Cap was no Richard Carpenter, but extremely few are ...

I can't really compare todays music to music from pre 80's. It's simply not the same. You can't compare midi/sample based, quantized, and pitch corrected music that started hitting the scene in the 80's to anything that came before. It's just simply not the same. There are real musicians still forming bands and recording, but you really have to look for them now. And even most of those people are having their recordings edited to perfection. Not saying one is better or worse, just saying in my opinion I can't really compare the two worlds. There'll never be another Led Zepplin or Beatles or Stones or Black Sabbath and so on. That kind of collaborative creativity is long dead, gone, buried, ashes sprinkled to the wind, and the widows have remarried and moved on. Real groups are still out there but they fall in the 'Indie' category now and are really hard to find.

I haven't seen any improvement in my DAW performance. I thought I would when I added in the RAM but nothing has changed that I can tell. One thing that blows my mind is how lightning fast this old game loads that I'm playing. I played it on PS3 many years ago. When you would go from one area of the open world map to another, or load a saved game, it would takes almost a minute depending on how long you played and how large the saved game files were getting. They increase in size the farther in to the game you are. It crashed constantly on the PS3 but so far I haven't had a single crash and the maps and saved games load in less than a second. I click 'Yes' to load the game, the saved game screen closes and it's loaded. It has to be less than a second. But as for a DAW work, I see zero performance increase. That's going to solely rely on your CPU based off what I'm seeing with this rig now.

Two things I've learned the hard way over the years is leave the PC plugged in but turn the PSU switch off and never spin the fans when blowing them out with compressed air from a can or from a compressor. You can actually create a voltage by spinning the fans and feed it back to the mobo if you spin them fast enough. I also have a wrist strap with an alligator clip on it but I can't find it. I threw it in a box somewhere years ago and swore I'd never open another PC. And here I am. I just rub my hands on a faucet, fridge handle (they always give you a good shock) and then touch the case. As long as it's plugged in and the PSU switch is off. I hold the fan blades still with my fingers or a pen/pencil. Anything nonconductive so they don't spin when I blow them out. That's all assuming your outlets are properly grounded. If they aren't you and your PC can get fried. EMF's can destroy data and chips too. Just touching any data cable inside your PC without your body being properly discharged beforehand can destroy it. I've told the story hear a few times about how I worked of fax machines a long long time ago. One of the big laser fax machines I worked on had a sensor to detect if the drum cartridge was in it. After a while it couldn't read it. It turned out to be the EMF between the sensor wires confusing the control board. Someone at the factory put the nylon tie straps on the wire harness too tight and the official fix was to cut the strap and that fixed it. I may have to flip this new PSU around in my PC. That clicking is driving me nuts. From a distance it sounds like arcing but it's not. I tried laying the PC on it's side and sitting it upside down and it doesn't do it so it has to be the fan in the PSU. Half the time the fans aren't even spinning on the GPU and I still hear it so I know it's not that. I just don't feel like going through the hassle of returning it and probably getting another one with the same problem. Honestly, I've never seen a PSU with the fan pointing down, but that's what the install sheet said to do if there were vents in the bottom of the case. This is a pretty nice case I have. It came with a PSU with the fan pointing up and it has vent holes on the bottom with a filter. There's a guy on youtube that has an entire channel dedicated to cleaning PC's. He does local drop off and every once in a while a viewer will send one in. It can make a difference. Thermal paste breaks down over time, fans get clogged with dust, dust settles on the electronics and all that makes everything run hotter. I didn't have the nerve to take the heat sink and fan off the CPU and re-paste it. Probably should have though. The guy on youtube goes as far as to take the GPU's apart and re-paste those too sometimes. Here's a link to his vids. Kind of fun to watch.

That's the ***ch about it. I was looking at the CPU's my Mobo supports. I can go one CPU higher than mine and it shows up on the Win 11 supported list last time I checked. It's the next CPU in the Mobo supported list from my 6700K. It's still selling for the same amount as some new CPU's and the speed is faster than some of the current gen i5's. It's all a scam. This PC right now is absolutely rock solid, really fast, and completely silent. It's unreal how well this thing is working. There's absolutely no excuse for them to be forcing people to upgrade their hardware. There's a lot of people po'd about it. I've seen some really good rants on youtube and on MS's forum about it. It's a scam and people know it. It may change by the EOL cycle for Win10. It almost has to. Some tree hugger needs to draw up a chart showing how evil MS is for creating all this e-waste and force them in to making Win11 work on "older" cpu's, most of which are as fast or faster than "new" lower end CPU's. Another bit of proof it's all a scam ... Netflix is the only app I'm running that won't show movies in 4K on my PC. They have it locked and 4K isn't even an option. I pay extra for their 4K service but the 4K list won't even display on the app on my PC. After spending an afternoon going down the rabbit hole looking for a solution, I found a tech pub they released. It's my CPU. Every other service I've used will stream in true 4K HDR except Netflix. I can stream it in 4K HDR using their app on this TV that has a CPU equal to a TRS-80 with 256Kb of SRAM and 1Kb VRAM, but I can't stream from my i7 6700 with 48GB RAM with a 12GB video card capable of 8K HDR on my PC because the CPU is too old. It doesn't bother any of the other services, just them. It's all one big giant steaming pile of ... scam.

Oh man, that's a loaded question here. I used to use it for more in depth projects like that but it was a crash fest so I switched DAW's eventually. I can honestly tell you I can count on 1 hand the amount of crashes I've had since I switched. That said, Sonar is now CbB and a different program now. It seems to be as rock solid when I do try it as S1 is. I wouldn't hesitate to use CbB now for larger projects. The only reason I haven't switched back is I paid a lot of money for S1 and I'm so used to it now. The GUI is soooo horrible in it though. I much prefer CbB's. They just need to update it for 4K monitors .... nudge nudge wink wink. That and I'm winding down on music. As the years roll on and the people who created the music I love are all but gone it's having an impact on me and I'm losing interest in recording and playing more and more. I could even see a day soon when I just mix down what I have now, put it on a storage device and wipe my HDD to save room. And the irony of that is, I have the most screaming, rock solid DAW I have ever had right now. Give it a try. It's free. But I understand the reluctance seeing how you risk getting deep in to a complex project like that and find it's not working. Make a fake project. Just do something from the hip with tons of tracks with tons of VST's and sample libraries. Randomly draw automation. Mess with tempo timing. Just take a Sunday morning and create something even if it sounds horrible and see how it holds up. I do remember using a lot of automation took a toll on Sonar. It makes any recording software run harder. The more I added the more corrupt the project became and the more unstable it all was.

It's frustrating really. I have a lot of software that has to be activated and re-activated regularly via the net so I have to keep this PC on the net and I don't feel comfortable doing that after Windows 10 is no longer supported. This CPU is plenty fast enough for what I do and it's really bothering me I have to upgrade it because of their software. I still have my last 3 PC's. I hate to throw that stuff out and there's no E-recycling places around here. I have a 486 with DOS 6.22 a Pentium and an i5 650. I keep the 486 for playing old DOS games but to be honest, I can't remember the last time I turned it on. It's an old Packard Bell 486 DX2/66. I have no idea. The TV is a cheap little Vizio model number V405-H19. I love it. Cheap, great refresh rate, great picture quality, and it plays nice with the video card. As soon as I boot up, the TV goes in to HDR mode and stays there no hassle. 60Hz in 4KHDR mode, and 120Hz in 1080p. I can't complain about that at all. The cheapest equivalent PC Monitor in this size with a 120Hz refresh rate is a little over $1, 000. This TV was in the $200 range IIRC? It's not available anymore but I'd bet the replacement model works just as well. I'm thinking that it was probably due to the fact I reseated all the cables. I move this PC around a lot and I probably should have done it sooner. I can't believe how quiet this is. I actually ran it without the cover on the case to make sure all the fans were going. It's pretty rare the video card fans ever kick on and the PSU fan is dead silent. The case and CPU fans are on all the time and I can't hear them unless I put my head near the case. They recommend you install the PSU with fan pointing down if you have vents on the bottom of your case and I did. I normally have the fan pointing up and that's how the PSU that came with the case was installed. It will make a rattling noise some times. At first I thought it was defective and arcing but when I lay the case on it's side it doesn't do it. Plus I could feel it vibrate when it made the noise. I'm sure it's because the fan never kicks in to high speed and is in there upside down so I'm not worried about it. It's been running as quiet as it did without a dedicated graphics card. I'm really shocked. I know I'm only playing an older game but still, it's in true 4K HDR with all graphics settings turn as far up as they will go. Plus I have a few eye candy mod's running. I still can't believe I never even had to change the BIOS settings. I left everything set up to be optimized for DAW usage. Side note about the PSU, I got it at the right time apparently. I've been watching prices and it's jumped $70 in price.

She was great in Mad Monster Party ...

I didn't hear any difference between any of the sets he A/B'd other than going from light to heavy gauge. I preferred the lighter gauge sound. But, in general, I hate the sound of new strings. IMO. YMMV.

I know Martin makes their own strings so there's at least 3. How do I know this ... some of my relatives used to make their strings in Nazareth ... before they opened their factory in Mexico that is ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

How do you go about fixing that? I ask because I recently discovered the California Patch method as they call it. You cut a scrap piece of drywall 4" wider all around than you need. Score and remove the drywall from the back leaving the front paper and a small filler piece of drywall to fill in the hole. You use the drywall paper as tape. It takes all the stress and frustration out of fixing holes like that. Here's a good vid on youtube with details on how to do it. I don't recommend using the premixed pink stuff for this kind of mud work because it's too thick. I watered it down and it worked ok but I went and bought a bag of the light compound because I had a lot more to fix and I had some skim coating to do. I just finished this remodel just before Christmas. That's primer on the trim in the last pic, that's why it's streaky and flat. There was an alarm system panel on the wall there and when I removed it I found that huge hole. It worked out because I could get in there to guide wire I had to run. There was only 2 switches in the box so I put in a new 3 gang box and added another switch and used all smart switches. The middle one is for the ceiling fan/light in the room. The original only had 1 hot wire so I had to go in the attic and build walkways across the floor joists and through the insulation to get to it and rewire the box with 14/3 w/g wire. I love doing this stuff. Wish we had an OT place here on the forum to talk about this stuff and show pics freely. I document all my projects and have tons of pics and video of the work I've done here at our place. Anyway, here's some before and after pics of the patch I did. You can't tell anything was ever there.

I used to have to run both depending on the business. I've installed a lot of it. I've installed a lot of cabling over the years for point of sales systems. When I started Panasonic used huge 5 pin din connectors. I got so good at soldering them I could strip the wire, tin it, bend it so it would line up perfectly with the solder connectors on the back of the plug, hold the plug and wire and solder in one contorted hand, and solder them with the iron with my other hand. And I'd get so in to it and moving so fast, I'd usually have to take desolder a few because I forgot to put the casing on the wire before I soldered the actual connector. Then sometime in the early 90's we stopped selling Panasonic and went to Arba and CRS and they were just switching over to RJ45. I learned all about the differences between the ones made for solid wire, stranded wire, the ones made for both (they failed a lot), plenum, non-plenum, shielded, un-shielded. My neighbor who is an IT guy that runs his own business said he's never, not once, installed shielded wire and has never had a problem. Not worth the risk IMO but to each his own I guess and who am I to argue with a guy who is almost 60 and been doing this his entire career. One of these days here soon I'm going to wire my house with CAT6. I was looking at enders and tools and they have RJ45's now that the wire goes all the way through and sticks out the front so you can see more clearly if you have a wire inserted properly and you don't have to worry about getting them all the way in to the end of the connector. The tool cuts the wire and crimps at the same time. I don't recall having access to anything like that back in the early 90's.

I can't wait until 2/22/2222. I'm gonna have a big party and invite all you guys's.

It makes more sense than most of what is actually here. (It sort of looks like the hack screen of the computers in Fallout 😜)

Works fine here. Never had a problem. It's the best rendition of that web site I've ever used. Must be your system.