Shane_B.

And yet, they want to tax us to death to stop it. Gotta love those mitten wearing, no, I hadn't better.

I know you asked Jim, but I have one of those Fender passive style basses he's talking about. I'm pretty sure he means the pickups. They are not active like EMG's that take a battery. The lesser expensive ones just doesn't have the oomph to drive a DI Box. Probably a combination of the lighter body and pickups. I've never played it through an amp but I imagine I would have a similar experience. When I'm not being lazy I always run mine through the Hi-Z Instrument input on my tube mic pre, out to my tube compressor, and in to my DAW. Fret noise is my biggest enemy. No matter how hard I try when I fret I always get a clacking sound. I love playing bass, hate recording it. I have a Made In Indonesia Fender PJ Bass. I'm right handed but I play left handed so my choices are very limited. It was the best feeling neck I ever found on a bass so I pretty much had to get it. My brother has an old Ibanez bass with active pickups and that thing is heavy and thunderous. I used to record with it even though he plays RH. Played it backwards. Uhg. Not easy on a bass. I actually learned how to play guitar with the high E on top. He bought me a LH guitar for Christmas one year so I'd stop messing with his and I had to relearn how to play, but it was quick.

It's about time. This whole crypto thing has sent PC part prices skyrocketing. This should have been done from Day 1. Or at the very least, Day 2. 5 year old GT1060's are going for that much used. Glad I waited it out. Of course, 30 days after it's released someone will release an unofficial firmware update for it to unlock it.

Another thing to keep in mind is when you are checking out samples of strings and piano and any real instrument, what you hear isn't necessarily what you want in your mix. Don't disregard something free that may not sound very good solo until you try it in a mix. You can pay a lot of money for great sounding sample libraries only to EQ and Compress the living daylights out of them to sound right in a mix with other instruments, but when solo'd they sound bad at that point. CbB comes with an excellent starting base. It includes Studio Instruments: Electric Piano, Strings, Bass, and Drums as well as TTS-1 which bitflipper already mentioned. Also, there is a set of FX VST's called PX-64 Percussion Strip, VX-64 Vocal Strip, and TL64 Tube Leveler. They are disabled by default. You have to go in to your plugin setup screen in CbB and enable them. You can really manipulate your samples and anything with those and get some excellent results, especially drums and vocals. There are a lot of youtube vids about them. You'll also see Boost 11. IIRC it's a 32bit version but the 64bit version is already enabled by default so don't enable it. 99% of what I do I use SI Strings, SI Bass, and TTS-1, and a ton of free synth's. There is more free stuff out there than you can shake a stick at. https://plugins4free.com/ is a good site. Sonic Anomaly makes some really good free mastering and FX VST's. Their website seems to be gone but you can still get their VST's here. Here is a good free piano put out by The University of Iowa of all places. Another suggestion is, create a folder named FreeVSTs or something like that and put your free stuff there to keep it separate. Makes it easier to backup too. You can give each one it's own subfolder. Most of the free stuff from sites like Plugin's 4 Free come without an installer and just a .dll file and you simply put it where you want and rescan for VST's at startup. It helps keep track of things and if you have one that crashes you can easily get rid of it. Kontakt Player is different, it embeds itself everywhere. You can get a few cool free things for it, but there's equal and better by random people out there.

All I have is a cheap MII Fender j/p bass. A lot of times I'll end up converting what I play to midi and use samples because no matter what strings I put on it or how careful I play I always get a clacking sound from the strings hitting the frets and it really stands out in the mix. When I do use what I have recorded I use a free VST called Bassprofessor MarkII. Their website is gone but you can still download it here for now. They made several good plugin's. It's a shame they're gone.

If anyone's interested to hear a sample of my analog adventure I just added a hardware master test to the thread of a song I posted in the song forum. It's pretty significant comparatively. I did remix it too I didn't just run the original master through the hardware. Here's a link. You don't have to comment or anything unless you want to. Not plugging the post, just showing a comparison. I did a lot of testing and reading a long time ago and found that Soundcloud converts songs better at a specific RMS and Peak level. It still seems to be the case. I forgot and mastered the original post to K14 iirc but I did the remaster to -18 RMS/-6 Peak which seems to be roughly K20. That seems to be the sweet spot. The volume is significantly different between the two so use caution if you listen to both. 👍🏻

Bob died!? Oh my God!

That used to be in your sig didn't it? 😄

I hear it's legal in the 3 southern states. Not the one I live in though. Nope. 🤪

Sorry to hear that Bill. Hope the power doesn't go out again tonight. 🤞🏻 I heard they are doing rolling outages all across the midwest grid because people are using too much power to stay warm. Repair guy is coming tomorrow morning to look at my stove that blew up when the power went out here last week. I had to plow the road and my driveway so they can get in tomorrow morning and it was -17F when I started. My outside temp thingy said it warmed up to 8F when I was done. Took me 3 hours. 🥶 This weather is crazy.

A Cakewalk hover car? Yeah, nothing could go wrong there except maybe go crash in the loudspeaker. 🚗🔊🚑

I hear Sonar Producer 8 is on sale though at Musicians Fiend. I mean, Friend.

Holy! I would think that would be illegal to sell wouldn't it?

I was going to say we're frozen and can't move. It's -17F here right now. But I think I'm getting him mixed up with BobF. He was from MO. I don't remember. I got hit in the head by a 12 ton bus. My memory ain't what it used to be. Back on track, @aidan ... this is interesting. I'll check it out. As soon as I thaw. 🥶

Pro Channel did the same thing though. And they were stripped down versions of full blown VST's. I do agree with you that it's not a good idea to do that. I was very disappointed when I first started using S1Pro and found out the VST were locked to it. On the other hand, they were pretty crappy until version 5 just came out. They really updated all of their VST's. My biggest criticism of them is they are excellent at telling you about the things they want you to know and even better at avoiding certain things they don't want you to know. For example, in a subforum here I was talking about how it took me 4 days to set up routing external hardware on my Presonus interface. What it boiled down to is you have to disable their virtual mixer and only use the inputs that have gain control knobs with the built in mic pre's. That's not in any manual anywhere or in any of their setup video's that I could find. What that means is, all those extra inputs I paid for are rendered useless in my setup because I wanted to set up all of my external mastering and processing hardware so it's always on and ready to go. You can easily route external hardware through S1 via a special VST they include with it that compensates for latency. Nobody that responded to me on their forum knew that either. In that regard they are very bad. They make great equipment and software but you are kind of on your own setting it up and figuring it out. And their forum is all but dead. CbB has the most helpful user group I've ever seen. Always has.

You can use most of their VST's in any DAW just not their synth. You have to install an add-on called Presonus Hub to do it. That said, there are plenty of things that came with Sonar that were locked to Sonar. Not everything was usable outside of it. CbB just doesn't include those any more. And like you said, just use something else and stop complaining. Go use a different screwdriver.

I'm still using 3.5.6.46910. I skipped 4 and just signed up for Sphere for a month and started using 5 last week. It has some new really nice features compared to 3.5. I will say one thing has changed that I don't like that goes way back. When booting up it used to take less than 3 seconds from the time I clicked the S1 icon till I got to the start page. Something happened a long time ago during the early days of 3 and now it hangs for about 10 seconds or so when it hits the Melodyne loading part. I contacted both parties and neither knows why. They say it shouldn't happen. I've even done a fresh install of my system to fix it thinking something got corrupted and nope. Something changed and that's just how it is now on my system. Others have checked for me and are not experiencing that. So there is one problem that kind of stinks.

Interesting. Seeing how the Studio One Professional 3 release only went up to version 3.5. 😁

Thanks. I'm thinking they don't have an OS at all actually. I know the RAID part is set up in BIOS and you can format them with a bootable USB thumb drive. I bet that's what it is. I'll look on youtube once I find new adblockers. They figured out how to defeat the ones I use and it's near impossible to watch youtube now. Uhg.

Hah. I've always read that backing up on to discs is bad because they go bad and laser rot and yadda yadda yadda. Yet I have two huge boxes full of them I burned over 25 years ago that still work perfectly. My first adventure in computing was when I wanted to add a SCSI CD burner to my system. I got exactly 0 good burns out of it before I ripped it out and threw it away.

I just looked in my Presonus account. I've been using Studio One in one form or another since January 17 2011. Over 10 years. My old DAW was a lower end i5 with 4GB RAM. Sonar would crash on it multiple times a session. With the same exact 32bit and 64bit VST's, SF2's, same exact external hardware Studio One crashed 0 times in 5 years of usage on my old DAW. Eventually the HDD failed and everything stopped working but I was running S1 off of one of those little tiny flat memory chips used in camera's connected to an external USB reader and using extra's of those cards to store projects and samples on. Since I built my new DAW going on 5(?) years ago now (see my sig) S1 has crashed 0 times. X2 won't even open on my new system and CbB crashed on me the other day twice. But it is extremely rare CbB crashes for me and I have no trouble with the Pro Channel now at all like I did in X2. The Pro Channel would actually turn itself on and off back before it had an on/off button in X1 and X2 and become unresponsive. I had X1 and X2 set to autosave every 60 seconds. That's how much it crashed. I have no reservations about using CbB whatsoever like I did with X2 and I don't even have autosave set up in CbB. I fully expect all software to crash at one point or another so I consider CbB to be just as stable as S1 seeing how I can count on 1 hand the amount of times CbB has crashed on me. It's rock solid for me how I use it on my PC. 👍 So there's a real world comparison from a single user. fwiw.

I'm not sure what a synchronization license refers to. I never looked it up. I took it to mean you need to get a license if using part of the original song along with the original artists video but I don't know. Seeing how you can't upload anything to youtube unless it is in video format then everyone would have to get a sync license, no? Take this guy for example ... I can't believe he's contacting every copyright holder of every one of these songs he puts out video's for. And he puts out a lot. But maybe he does, I don't know. Youtube is sending mixed signals on what is and isn't acceptable. For example the video I did that they took down, gave me a strike for, then put it back up and told me I could monetize it. I still have all the emails and the video is still there and can be set public with monetization. Not that I ever would. I'm not going to worry about it either way. Side note, I either read or watched a vid a while ago by a guy saying it's better not to copyright your own material now. I forget the reasoning behind it and if I can find it again I'll post a link to it. It made sense at the time when I saw it.

Can you explain your NAS a little? What software controls it? I'm thinking of building one from an old i5 cpu based mobo I have in a case. I even have a video card. Just need drives and older ram. But I can't seem to find info on what software it is that runs them.

A lot of us feel that way. I understand being a big supporter of a product but I think it's offensive when people immediately put others down and show absolutely no empathy at all when someone vents their frustration. It isn't like we all haven't done it at some point ... lighten up. (Not talking to the OP) I used to get incredibly frustrated because way back when I was working I only had a few hours on the weekends to record and blow of steam. I spent 99% of my limited time trying to get Sonar to be stable. I once offered to box up my audio interface, PC, and cables and ship to Boston in an effort to see if they could make it work. The offer was declined. Since the stock answers always seem to be just avoid doing what you're doing and it's you not the software then maybe you need a change of scene? A lot of us went to Presonus Studio One Professional when the Sonar X series arrived. Craig Anderton writes really good how-to and tips-tricks articles for Presonus that come up on the start page of S1 a lot. I think every Friday iirc?? You can try out the full pro version of S1 and everything they offer for 30 days at a time for a small fee or try a limited demo of just S1. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using more than one DAW. I find myself switching between CbB and S1 regularly. Good luck.