John Maar

I just checked my Singularis installation folder. The .EXS file is small (around 2MB, 68K zipped), so it must be using the same .WAV samples that the Kontakt .NKI file references.

I bought Singularis over 6 years ago. It was one of my first purchases after picking up Kontakt 5 in Komplete 9 Ultimate.

Maybe they finally changed. I have licenses for some of their (Slate Digital, from the same Steven Slate) Virtual Mix Rack plugins that I bought 5 years ago. I just checked their website and found this statement: The All Access Pass can be used with iLok Cloud and does not require an iLok USB dongle. You will just need an active internet connection to use iLok Cloud. Perpetual "Buy Now" individual plugin licenses require an iLok 2 or iLok 3 USB dongle.

Yet another reason to break the bank and buy a license for the full version of Kontakt. I got a license for v5 when I purchased Komplete 9 Ultimate years ago. I've never had a reason to buy the Komplete upgrades, but I bought a Kontakt v6 upgrade and will do the same when v7 is released next month. I have SampleTank, but hate the UI. Never use it. FWIW, I will never go near Slate. He's one arrogant mother, and his refusal to permit machine authorizations with iLok (dongle only and now Cloud, too) is a deal-breaker for me. I never got the dongle to worked reliably on any desktop or laptop that I owned and had to give up on all of the Slate plugins I'd purchased. I don't care how good his products are, I'm finished with him. I have been very happy with Superior Drummer, first v2 and now v3. Great libraries!

Glad to hear. Wouldn't be surprised if my path crossed his at some point. I started in Comm Sector (like police and fire radios), but did some work with Semi peeps. How about PMing me his name and I'll see if I can remember him from 20-25 years ago. I do remember that the semi plant in Austin was running down to 13% capacity. Moto got up to $9.5 billion annual capacity but dropped to $4.5 billion annual semi sales after screwing up cellular (semi's largest customer). Politically, Moto was only able to downsize to $5.5 billion annual capacity. Too many execs protecting THEIR plant. That overcapacity was one of the things that killed Moto. Spinning them off as Freescale couldn't prevent the inevitable. The vaunted corp HQ in Schaumburg, IL that I nominally reported to now has Ericsson signage. I was in Chicago the summer of '21 to get my French Long Stay visa, and it broke my heart when I drove by it and saw the new signs.

I'm on a 4K display, but running Win11 at 200% scaling, so I've turned an expensive laptop display into an old 1080p display. But some apps don't scale, and I'm stuck with fonts I can't read even with 3x reading glasses. I was looking at 32" 4K monitors, but they're stupid expensive, so I'm sticking with the 4K display built into my P17.

My experience in some of the major companies I consulted is that marketing's most important task was to obscure the primary company objectives...growth and the bottom line. Here's a classic example, from a 1998 article in the New York Times: And so the Ford Motor Company has decided it is time to jettison its tagline of the last 17 years, ''Quality is job one.'' In a $40-million-a-year corporate advertising campaign that begins today, Ford introduces its new theme: ''Better ideas. Driven by you.'' Ford did achieve some nice improvements in quality, but it was never Job One. Motorola provided semiconductors to all 3 of the Big Three, so I got a chance to look inside of each back in the mid-90s. Ford was the best to work with. Top down command and control. General Motors had dozens of fiefdoms, much more difficult to negotiate. And Chrysler? The less said, the better.

Good luck with the visit! You're a drummer and I'm a bassist, so I think you might appreciate the first audio I ran through my new Focal Shape 65's. My new studio is finally coming together after tearing down the one in the U.S. 18 months ago. Feels really good. Next to be connected is my NI S61 Mk2. Great keyboard controller.

You just HAD to bring that up, didn't you? 😄 Happy to hear that you're happy. Getting to the right place in life is usually difficult to impossible. This thread has gotten WAY off topic, but that's OK, because XLN haven't done doodlely squat new in forever. It's off-topic threads like this that keep them in the light. Back off-topic. I am SO glad I moved on from marketing to engineering, but I have to add one important caveat. What I did learn through my 1st semester junior year, especially the three semesters of accounting, really helped me later in my engineering career. Not many engineers can talk to the C-suite and be taken seriously. I could talk their talk. What I consider my best-ever moment happened in Korea in 1999. I had a partnership with PWC Consulting at the time. They had a lead for a major consulting gig at LG-Caltex (the petroleum group of LG). They wanted a white-face to present the program to the board and they specifically wanted one from Motorola, the inventor of Six Sigma. Well, that turned out to be me. LG brought three rows of aluminum stadium seating into the boardroom for the unit presidents and senior VPs. Along the opposite wall were seated the local PWC staff trying to get the contract. There were 10 guys on the board, very old. Each was stone-faced enough to be on Mt. Rushmore. The chair at the opposite end for the CEO was empty. His personal assistant, one of the most lovely women I've ever seen, dressed in a formal ancient Korean gown, came in through a private door and set a glass of pink juice on a doily and left the room. That was the signal that the CEO was arriving. He came in and the entire LG group stood and bowed for precisely the same amount of time without looking at each other and sat back down. The angle of their bows was also so precise, I could have shot a laser across their backs. They all stared straight ahead and never looked at me. I thought I was in real trouble. The CEO sat down and very casually crossed his legs and looked off to my right, also not looking at me. I'd done my research and found out that he'd been at U.W.-M. at the same time I was, studying for his PhD, so I greeted him as a fellow Badger and gave my 45 minute presentation that no one appeared to be paying attention to. I felt like a comedian who'd gotten zero applause during his entire routine. When I finished, I asked for questions. The closest board member to me on my left turned and asked "who else in our business is doing this?" After a moment of contemplation, I responded "what's wrong with going first?" No more questions. I thanked them for their "attention". The CEO got up to leave the room (so I and everyone else in the room thought), but he walked around the board and came up to me, already a breach of protocol. I held out my right hand with my left hand, palm up, slightly leading my right hand in a position of #1 respect. He grabbed my hand and put his other arm around my shoulder. Now EVERYONE was looking. He whispered to me "that was exactly what I wanted to hear" and turned and left the room, which was full of stunned faces, which I read as "he's going to make us do this." That one answer was worth several million dollars of revenue. I spent the next 9 months there, helping them get the program going. I was able to bill them over $5K a day, just for my time. I smoked my partner in the U.S. who had responsibility for the Americas. He was a real buttwipe, so I enjoyed every moment of our annual business review with the Moto C-suite that year.

I don't know NI's policy on upgrades for purchases made very close to a new major version's release. Try asking them directly. I was able to delay upgrading to v6 until the upgrade went on sale because I hadn't purchased any libraries that required v6. I'll do the same with v7 unless they offer an upgrade sale upon release.

Perfect timing. I'm being connected to the fiber network for internet on the 27th. I still haven't downloaded the Syntronik 2 libraries from a purchase months ago. ('ve been using my cell phone as a hotspot and have very limited monthly data. Going over that limit is stupid expensive (36 cents per MB, not GB!). The only other major upgrade for me will be Kontakt 7 when Komplete 14 is released. I bought Komplete 9 Ultimate and have never felt the need to upgrade it. I paid for the Kontakt v5 to v6 upgrade. The only other major version update that would have required an upgrade purchase was Guitar Rig v5 to v6...and I don't use Guitar Rig. Absynth is still v5 (and dropped from K14!). FM is still v8. Battery is still v4. So, no need for Komplete 14.

I, too, started in Marketing at the U.W.-Madison School of Business. I only made it through the 1st semester, junior year. I reached a point where I couldn't stand the students I was in class with, and their attitudes toward other people and their money. I did not want to be like them, and I certainly didn't want to work with them. I had a dream one night that after graduation, the only job I could get was in northern Wisconsin, working for a paper company and having to create a marketing program for a brand of toilet paper that I absolutely wouldn't use myself. So, after a lengthy internal heart-to-heart, I switched to the U.W. engineering school. Had to go back and take some freshman math courses. Took me seven years to finish. Turned out to be the perfect choice for me (all the student loans after I maxed out the GI Bill notwithstanding).

I'm not buying any more 8DIO libraries. I'll wait for the Soundpaint version.

Fascinating little ditty, Mr. Screed. My only question is: In hex, octal or decimal?

One thing I should have added: those multiple, violent stab wounds were from my bosses. My clients loved me. I may have been the only consultant they ever worked with who cared more about their success than his/her bottom line. More than once, I walked away from business when the board and the C-suite wouldn't walk the talk. Each of those times resulted in multiple stab wounds. 😋

Not sure I'm one to give life advice. I suffered a TBI in September 1965. American football. Been living with PTSD-like symptoms ever since. 0 for 3 on wives. 0 for my adult life on relationships. I'm lucky my dogs love me. I managed a great career, which I feel proud of. If I can offer any advice at all, it's to not let your job consume you. When you leave work, leave the work behind. Forget about it. Really enjoy the time you've got with your friends and family. Once a moment has passed, it's gone for good. Be joyful. Smile. Be kind to those around you. Love your neighbor as you do yourself, regardless of their color, gender, who they sleep with or who they pray to.

😅Got sidetracked.

Well, as long as we're copping to our business heritage, I'm the dude on the ground.

The SDX Value Pak on Thomann.fr is 349 €. When I go to their U.S. site, it's $289. The site isn't (at the moment), forcing me to the European site (.de/fr). I may try to buy it via my U.S. PayPal account and see if they force me to euros and VAT. Later today.

Thanks for posting that. MS pushed the update to me this morning, so I ran it. Surprised it's already out. I'm used to more like November for the H2 releases. That video is almost an hour long! Sheesh. Watching it was have to wait until after I walk and feed my dogs. The only thing I noticed so far was Do Not Disturb for notifications. It's either a new feature or it just got turned on by the update. The download and installation process was very smooth. Let's hope I don't run into a BSOD later today.

My first computer programming experience was on an IBM mainframe that was housed in its own building at U.W.-Madison in 1974. There was a room full of keypunch machines. Each card was one line of code. We used Ditran (Diagnostic Fortran). You'd write your little program (e.g., a bubble sorter), submit the card deck to the computer gods on the other side of the glass room that housed the mainframe, and come back in an hour or three or the next morning to get your printout and card deck back, only to find out that you'd made a typo on one card, and had to go through the whole process again. My first professional computer programming was on a DEC PDP 8e (the last model with a wire-wrapped motherboard instead of the newer PCB motherboards). It had 32K x 12 of core memory (non-volatile) on 4 8K x 12 cards. You had to load the bootup program via paddle switches on the front (12-bit octal (which suuuuuuucks)). Storage was on a 1 MB 14-inch unsealed platter. It used the TED line-based text editor for programming and had a 3-pass paper tape assembly language compiler. I used it to write control programs for the Neutrino beam line at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in '78-'79, before I went to work for Amoco Oil. It was my first job out of college. I got so wrapped up in work and had a heavily progressive travel schedule, that my music life was relegated to listening. My last 15 years of work was at Motorola. I was laid off at 54 when the original Motorola dissolved, which probably saved my life. I spent the final 8 years in the consulting group in Motorola University, finishing with managing the consulting business in Asia and Europe. I was spending 200+ nights a year sleeping in hotels and another 40+ sleeping on airplanes. I spent my severance package playing golf 4+ days a week for 9 months in Scottsdale. I got completely bored with that, bought a master blaster Sony VIAO PC and got into music production. That was around 2006, so I'm a late-comer to the MIDI world, even though I've been programming since the mid '70s.

Another one bites the dust Another one bites the dust And another one gone and another one gone Another one bites the dust Hey I'm gonna get you too Another one bites the dust

I haven't tried exporting a GP file to MIDI. I just checked, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of control (type 0 vs type 1, individual MIDI channel assignments per instrument, etc). I just found this video on YT, so I'll have to give it a watch after taking my niece out for her birthday lunch today.

640 KB seemed like a LOT back then. My first personal computer was a home-built S100-buss box with a Z80 CPU card and two (count them, 2) 8K by 8 RAM cards for a total of a whopping 16K. Each RAM card cost me about $500. I had a Tiny BASIC 3K ROM, but mostly I programmed in assembler. My external storage was on a cassette. No floppy. No hard drive. ADM3 TTY terminal. But I had a personal computer! I eventually upped the RAM and added twin double-density, double-sided 8" floppies (which I had to write the driver for myself). Ran CP/M great. My first DOS computer had an 8088, ran CP/M and CP/M86 and DOS. It was a Heathkit that came with 192K of RAM. It had a great color display controller that DOS2 on an IBM PC couldn't match. Spent the bucks and maxed out the RAM to 640K. Twin floppies and a small hard drive. Used it for years. My new phone, a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 (bought for my birthday last month) has 512 GB of storage and 8 GB of RAM, and cost way less than my first S100-buss computer. And that's not accounting for inflation! My, oh my!

Because 32 GB of RAM was what my Gen 1 Lenovo ThinkPad P17 came with. It was a preconfigured system that was discounted 50%. The Gen 2 P17s support up to 128 GB of DDR4 RAM, but I'm really happy with what I got for the money. One external drive is a TB3 SSD for my samples. The other 2 2TB SSDs are USB3.2, still super fast. One's for song development, the other's for backup.