Shane_B.

I still use my Audio Technics stage mic I bought for $99 back in the 80's. The foam inside the screen is crumbling away. I bought a Blue Bluebird and it's very sensitive to my voice. I have a very boomy voice with a lot of sibilance and it pics up everything. I spend more time fixing vocals than I do anything else. Honestly, I should probably sell it. It's like brand new.

This is the only YouTube ad I have ever watched more than the minimum amount of time until the 'Skip Ad' button came up. The last line of the video has to be one of the greatest sales pitches I have ever heard . . . "With Nail The Mix there's no better way to get an inside look at a producers mind unless you stick your head straight up his *****!"

I can only do my music so long then the Tinnitus starts acting up really bad and I need to take a break. After about 30 minutes the 80Hz and 5kHz tone in my left ear with what sounds like Morse Code in the background and the 10kHz tone in my right ear start to get significantly louder. That's why I was thinking of getting in to something else like gaming while I'm stuck inside but it costs too much to do right. At least it's warming up here now. Probably should start spending more time outside.

They're trying to reach a broader range of users because professional studio's are all but gone. And the ones that are left don't care how much it costs because in reality it doesn't cost them anything. It gets passed on to their customers. I don't like it but it does save me money. I just signed up for Presonus Sphere. They present it a lot better than it actually is now that I have it and have looked at everything that is available. The only real plus to it is you get some cloud storage and Studio One Pro (current version) and Notion with all the add-on sample packs for Notion for less than the cost of upgrading just Studio One every cycle. The other stuff is nice to have access to, but to be honest, there was nothing there that interested me once I got in and saw what was available and most of the VST's they offer already come with Studio One so they aren't really offering anything special in that regard. My whole problem with this is, you are locked out of your own work if you don't keep up with the subscriptions. That's not right. Mibby is right, it should be rent to own. You should never be put in to a situation to where you are locked out of your own work if you don't pay a ransom. And true, you can just simply buy a permanent license for the software now, but we all know how the slippery slope works. That could very well go away soon.

It's only 9am and I feel like I've wasted the entire day already. Not that there's anything to do or anywhere to go. Losing my marbles. Something's gotta give. Soon.

Give that money to Melda and get all of their plugins, free updates, plus any new plugins they put out for free as long as they are in business.

Here's exactly what they said. "This table compares the distortion behaviour of popular Pultec EQ plug‑ins, based on an average input signal of -10dB, and the low shelf boost set at 5 (halfway). The higher the ranking, the more 'mojo'."

I'm sure you are right. They will peak higher but I try to have all my tracks hover at -20dB rms. I started using external hardware and it's easy to get your signals too hot so I try to keep them low. I'm more than happy with the analog EQ's that came with the Fat Channel in Studio One. Plus I also have a collection by Nomad Factory but I never use it. I can't hear any difference between those and other's I've demo'd when used in a mix. Same with the various Softube compressors. I bought those too then Studio One included their versions with their Fat Channel and I can't hear any difference at all in the mix. If I A/B them and critically listen then yeah, maybe.

I was clicking around on different things in the link and saw an article that caught my eye. It was a link to SOS about how hot your signal should be going in to a vintage passive EQ VST. 10,000 paragraphs later they finally tell you it's -10dB at the very end. Just thought I'd save you all the trouble of reading it in case you saw it. 😁

Hey now, slow down there. Remember it took me 4 days to set up a stupid compressor. 😁

Yeah, since you mention it, when I was in Oregon and Washington the locals were not happy about the state of their states. All I'll say is, if you leave some place because it's so bad and head North ... don't bring your b.s. with you. The natives of Oregon and Washington were some of the nicest people I ever met. A friend of mine I've known since 1st grade from NJ recently made a trip out west in one of those old people delivery vans she had customized. This vid on youtube is her giving a tour of the van if your interested in that kind of thing. It has over 1.2 million views. Her and her girls stopped to stay with me overnight on her way back through. I hadn't seen her since 89 when we graduated H.S.. Edit: I forgot to mention she loved Idaho and didn't want to leave. I want my final resting place to be Idaho or maybe even Utah. We went out that way one time for 2 weeks and canceled the 2nd week of our trip to stay in Idaho longer.

Monster Bash 1 ~ 3, Vinyl Goddess From Mars, Jill Of The Jungle 1 ~ 3, Xargon 1 ~ 3, Putt Putt Goes To The Moon, Duke Nukem Manhattan Project was an advanced 2D sidescroller with 3D graphics, Raptor Call Of The Shadows, Realms Of Chaos. I still have all of the original floppies and CD's although some of the floppies were dead the last time I tried them. I have all of them on an old HP 486 with a whopping 100MB (iirc) HDD that miraculously still works. It has to be 25 plus years old. I have it set up with a custom autoexec.bat and config.sys to display a popup menu with custom options to run each game with different memory settings and sound card IRQ settings. I really miss those days/games.

My wife is an engineer and used to travel 2 to 3 weeks out of every month for work. She spent a lot of time in Oregon and Washington designing and setting up water treatment plants and I went with her a few times. I loved the area and wished I could have stayed longer.

I'm horrible at gaming on the PS but it's cheaper than a PC and I would just be miserable with a PC that I knew could run games properly if I only dumped another grand or 4 in to it which ain't gonna happen, per my wife. I don't know how these guys on Twitch are getting all these kills with PS4's. You can't cheat on console. I downloaded Warzone and tried it. 100Gb DL for nothing. Thankfully it's one of the very few free to play online games on the PS. My ping is as good as the guys with the fiber lines. I think their servers are locked or throttled or something because I show the same and sometimes better ping as them. But my CPU lag and fps are far worse no doubt. By the time I see someone and pull the trigger I'm dead. Almost every time. And it takes soooooo long to start. O.M.G.. Quake you would make a custom start batch file to automatically connect you to a server, and you were in in like 5 seconds. On this thing . . . If you are playing single like I have to I spend 5 minutes getting in a game, 30 seconds in the game before getting fragged, and 10 seconds in the gulag where you have the chance to 1 on 1 someone and re-enter where you were on the server so you don't have to go allllll the way back to the beginning of the game and wait to be matched to another server. It's really that bad and it sucks. Plus while you're waiting for a server they throw you in a practice server while you're waiting and if you get killed you have to wait to get thrown back in to it. It's maddening. I was well known and hated on the East Coast. I was [LEATHERFACE] at Nac.net's server. And you are 100% right, I was only 20 or so miles from their server location. I had a great ping on dial up and could not be beat. I had a 120ms ping which was really good for dial up. I remember doing all the custom modem settings to get it to skip some of the handshakes and make your connection as fast as it could. 56K protocols and all that. Hah. It was extremely rare that I went down. I brought so many people to the server that they made me an admin. There's still a few active Quake servers out there. And you can still get it to run on Win 10 but it's very difficult. I tried just for the heck of it and I gave up. Those were the days. I wish they didn't screwup Fallout online with 76. It's another abomination and probably a glimpse at what to expect with Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. It frightens me to think that I'll be hugging 60 by the time those games are scheduled to come out. Finishing a working Bethesda game is one of my bucket list items. hah.

I've always wondered what hardware developers use? Are they developing while viewing and editing on the maximum graphics settings the game can run at? Higher? Lower? Are they using consumer grade video cards or something more powerful that isn't even marketed for home use. Streaming the graphics from a server is becoming a thing now too. I tried to stream Fallout 3 on my PS4 via PS Now. They want $100 to download it so I just tried to stream it. You need a really good connection. I have a 30Mb/20Mb and it just barely kept up. Amazon is in the beta testing stages of a game streaming service. So eventually it may be that if you have a fast enough internet connection you just need the bare minimum GPU to display an HD or 4K stream, which even the embedded intel GPU's do now.

On a side note though, for medical purposes this is great news. My sister has RSD. It's a M.S. type disease caused by a physical injury. In her case she fell on ice where she worked. She'll be in a wheelchair in a few years. The thing that works the best for pain relief is the stuff they just made legal but up till now she hasn't been able to because of the Workman's Comp rules and they have been forcing her off the 'other' pain killers and she's been in a living hell for quite a few years now. So hopefully that will change for her and others back home in NJ. But as for recreational use, it's horrible. Never should have happened.

*Speaking louder so you can hear 😜* ... He said, New Jersey just made it so politicians are your weed dealer now and will quadruple the cost of your weed creating a boom for the Tony Soprano types. Who incidentally have more integrity and I respect more than politicians. Not that I know any of those T.S. types. That whole thing is just a myth. They really don't exist. *brushing my nose to the side*.

I just checked and that brand new PNY GTX1060 6GB is still there for $250 + $15 shipping. That's the cheapest I've seen a 1060. Makes me wonder if there's something about this PNY non/oc'd version that miners and gamers don't like. Speaking of shadow and ray tracing, I think it's getting out of hand. It's like they are striving to turn games in to real-time lifelike filmed movie productions. Most of the big name studio games that I've seen demo's of are just cinematic cutscenes with a few minutes of the gaming here and there just to tell you what to do to advance to the next cinematic event. I wouldn't want Fallout or Skyrim to be that way or look any better than they are now, just perform better in regard to framerate. Heck, GL Quake still looks great to me. So does Unreal and Half Life. All those games ran fantastically on affordable hardware that came several generations after they were released. Things started to change around the time of Prey though imo. They all started to focus on lighting and higher res textures. I never did play that. I installed it only to find I was forced to create a Steam account and update the game before I could register it. It was a 2Gb update iirc and I was on dial up so it didn't happen. And at the time they were cracking down on CD Check cracks and I couldn't find one to hack my own freaking game. So, sadly the disc was defective (nudge nudge wink wink) and I had to exchange it for a new unopened box, and then return the unopened box. That's when I got out of gaming because that's when I noticed that the cost of hardware to run these new games and Steam were getting prohibitively expensive and in fact impossible for me on dial-up. Then I made the mistake of jumping to the PS3. For those of you who tried to run Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas on a PS3 you know what an absolute abomination it was. I've been watching some of these gaming streamers on Twitch play COD Warzone. Some of them show their specs real-time on screen. These guys are running Warzone in 4K at 170FPS with a <30ms Ping and 0 packet loss against 150 other people in a live battle royale. What kind of alien technology do you have to have to do that?!

I mentioned this on another forum one time where we were talking about SSD's and HDD's and was attacked by a moderator. True story. Some people take this stuff way too seriously. But I stand by my prediction. As the gap between RAM and SSD speeds close you'll see systems where there is no RAM and no system storage. It will all be combined. You can have virtual RAM and drives now, you're just limited by speed.

I found a GTX1060 in opened but never used condition on eBay for $250 plus $15 shipping. It's been there for a couple days and nobody is jumping on it and I don't know why. It's exactly what I want but I'm afraid to get it because it's been there so long and I wonder what's wrong with it that I'm not seeing. The guy has 100% positive feedback. And yet the same card type is being bid up for more than that in other auctions and most have a buy it now for well over $300. This one seems like a great deal but as you know, there's no such thing as a great deal. Something is wrong that's why nobody is pouncing on it. I've been looking for this stupid card for months just to play a few 5 ~ 10 year old games.

I've heard the same from several techs. I don't have any reservation using them long term but the cost per GB compared to HDD is something I can't justify. The installation/setup performance gains don't justify the cost on my sample limited setup.

Hey, someone had to do it . . . He has some excellent video's on a variety of topics. His video about compression completely changed how I approach mixing. 👍🏻

I can't find the video now but I remember seeing an A/B/C comparison of SSD vs HDD by Linus Tech Tips on YouTube. He set up 3 gaming rigs side by side and didn't tell his staff what type of drive was in each one and had them try them all. They all said the one with the HDD was faster and more responsive. I tried to find the video but he's done several SSD vs HDD comparisons and I couldn't find the specific one I was looking for. What I took away from it was yeah they are fast for large file transfers and installations but in real world applications like gaming HDD actually performed better. I'm not sure how that translates to the DAW domain. I'm running 2 250GB SSD's in my DAW (See sig). Previously on my old i5 750 I had 2 HDD's and one died. I ended up running off of external USB memory cards from an old camera. The roughly inch long rectangular ones. I saw no difference in performance with the exception of installation speed. I could have more than quadrupled my drive space for the same cost if I would have went with HDD's this time. I regret not doing that now. My system seems to go through phases depending on what Microsoft does with Win10 at any given moment anyway. Sometimes it's snappy and lightning fast, then an update will come through and it will be sluggish until the next update, then it's snappy again. I hate everything about Windows 10.

iLok activation has always been optional since I've been using Melodyne 2 thankfully. When I did a search for that error [user privileges insufficient to start a low level driver] a ton of hits came up regarding iLok and how to update their Pace drivers. But it does seem like a very generic error message that could be related to just about anything.