bitflipper

Although theoretically not impossible (e.g. corrupt files) I have never experienced any hangs or crashes related to free Kontakt libraries. In fact, they are often less prone to problems because they aren't as heavily scripted. Many of them contain no scripting at all. The only issues I've encountered have had to do with poor sound quality: too much stretching, bad loop edits, noise or distortion in the samples, inconsistent levels or mistakes in mapping (gaps or overlaps). Free plugins, OTOH, that's a whole 'nother can o' worms. (BTW, if you're specifically looking for a good but cheap trumpet, check out Blue Street Brass from Indiginus. $79 and you get a bunch of trumpets and related instruments such as a flugelhorn, trombone and civil war bugle.)

I've only missed one gig, back in 1976. That time I was so sick with the flu that I couldn't stand. Luckily, it was a trio with three singers. I only sang half the songs so the other two singers were able to manage without me. The guitarist was inspired by that gig to go solo, and he's been primarily a solo act ever since. A deserving nominee for the Show Must Go On award is Dave Grohl, who broke his leg during a performance and still managed to finish the gig. He did, however, wimp out and cancel the next night's performance.

I found out - after making reservations - that we were staying at the most popular hotel in Las Vegas for suicides.

They are the apex of the genre, no doubt. I like the old stuff best, with the original vocalist - maybe she was a notorious b*tch she could belt like no other and had a huge stage presence. Although the current gal certainly holds her own. I really regret missing them when they were in Seattle, back when they were still playing 1,000-seat rooms.

I found this inspirational. One of my favorite bands. In 2012 their singer got sick and the show was about to be cancelled, with a packed house already waiting. They came out and asked the audience if it would be OK to muddle through the show anyway. Singers from the supporting acts printed out lyric sheets and bravely gave it their best shot. Real pros, every one of them. These aren't easy songs to sing. I know I wouldn't have asked for my money back. https://youtu.be/zH33rNy33iU (Sorry, got a message that embedding this video was prohibited)

Not making this up...I passed by a Ten-dollar Store. "Everything $10 or less!" said the sign. We were on the bus at the time, so I didn't run in to see if they had any expired cereal for $9.99. Sunday's lunch at the Belaggio was $75. Food quality was pretty good, and to be fair the price included all the mimosas you could drink. For those who don't know what a mimosa is (I didn't), the recipe is to take the cheapest champagne you can buy and dilute it with reconstituted orange juice so it's semi-palatable. Turns out, "all you can drink" means approximately 0.1. We even tried adding more orange juice but it still tasted like cleaning solvent. My granddaughter's fitbit says we walked 30 miles in 3 days. Even though my back pain had returned a couple weeks ago, it wasn't slowing me down. I was pretty happy about that, until I realized that I'd been inadvertently popping hydrocodone pills each day. Meant as a just-in-case first aid item, I had put them into my daily pillbox along with the usual vitamins and heart meds, on the theory that that would elicit fewer TSA questions than a baggie. Then forgot they were in there. So it wasn't the exercise that was helping my back after all. That may also explain why I tipped every street musician we passed. Even the guy banging on a plastic bucket.

Well, last night made the whole trip worthwhile. Blue Man Group. Afterward my face literally hurt from smiling all the way through it. I wasn't even high. I'd seen lots of videos of BMG, all recorded in arenas. Last night it was an 800-seat room, really the perfect size for that kind of entertainment. Very interactive with the audience. So much of the show was going on in the audience area that we actually missed some of it due to our front row seats. A great time was had by all. Highly recommended. Yes, Christian, I am in Everett. We actually flew out of Paine Field this time. What a great experience that was. Two minutes to clear security. Didn't bother looking up the gate number, as there are only two gates. Plus it's a lot easier talking someone into giving you a ride to the airport when it's 10 minutes away. Speaking of the pool, turns out $125 just gets you an umbrella. If you want a lounge chair to go with it, it'll be $200. The biggest disappointment: four large pools and every one of them exactly 3.5 feet deep. My granddaughter broke a toenail attempting to swim. At least there was the entertainment value of a thousand tourists baring skin that really should have been better left covered.

Checked out the pool this morning. There is no shade there unless you rent an umbrella for $125. Guess it'll be a brief swim. But you don't have to get out of the pool to buy alcohol. A mere $30 for a cocktail. Good thing a) I don't drink. b) cannabis is legal here, and c) I brought my own from home (yes, the price of pot is similarly inflated here).

Las Vegas used to be the greatest tourist bargain around. At least, as long as you weren't a compulsive gambler. Hotel rooms for $45, all-you-can-eat buffets for $8.99. Shows starting at $20, maxing out at less than $100. That was because gambling used to subsidize everything. When I first came here 40 years ago, there weren't many places where gambling was legal. That's no longer the case; I have half a dozen Indian casinos close to home. As gambling revenue went down, Vegas compensated by shifting to more conventional tourist offerings and started nickle-and-diming the rubes. I arrived last night and already I've spent $40 for the cab ride (~ 2 miles), $37 for a tuna sandwich and a hamburger, $18 for two coffees, $10 for a $3 cigar, $36 on bottled water. And of course, those cheap hotel rooms are a thing of the past - $1600 for two rooms for three nights. This will probably be my last trip to Las Vegas. Disney World has become a better value. So why the f am I here? Making good on a promise, I'd promised my granddaughter I would take her to Vegas when she turned 21. We procrastinated. This week she turned 33. So we figured it was time for her to cash in on that promise. It's her first time here, and she's digging it. I would, too, if somebody else was picking up the tab. But I'm making a point of not bitching about prices, so as not to spoil her fun. Tomorrow night is Blue Man Group. We have seats down front in the "poncho section". Should make the whole adventure worthwhile.

The first time I produced any audio on a computer there was no sound card involved, just the built-in speaker of the Apple ][. I had some software that could encode audio using pulse-width modulation, a very clever way to make the primitive off/on gated speaker do more than just beep. The audio was barely recognizable, but immense fun nevertheless. A computer game called Castle Wolfenstein utilized the trick to add voices to the game. A couple years later, I bought a rather expensive synthesizer card called an Adlib. I couldn't do much with it, although at least one computer game, King's Quest, could use it for background music. Next investment was an 8-bit Soundblaster, mainly because it had a lot of support with computer games. I was recording through all those years, but to a 4-track reel-to-reel. The computer played no part in the process beyond displaying lyric cue sheets. Until 1988, when Cakewalk 1.0 let me create elaborate MIDI sequences and mixes. Even though that was a world-changer, I gave up recording for a long time in order to become a full-time workaholic. Plunging into work had its rewards, some financial but others not as welcome. Such as my first heart attack in 2005. That forced a drastic realignment of priorities, including bringing music back into my life. I reckoned Cakewalk had probably continued to improve their product, so looked them up and discovered SONAR. I ordered SONAR 5 Power Studio from Sweetwater because it came bundled with a Roland interface. That thing was pretty awful, to be honest. Fortunately, it just stopped working one day, forcing an upgrade (MOTO 828).

A review in Polyphony magazine, c. 1988 IIRC, for Cakewalk 1.0. I think Craig Anderton wrote that review, but haven't been able to get him to confirm it. I got very excited by the prospect of a MIDI sequencer on my computer, but Cakewalk was selling for about $300 and that was a financial stretch for me on a $30k/year bit-flipper's salary. As luck would have it, I went to Los Angeles to visit a customer there, a little chain of 4 music stores called Guitar Center. Made friends with the IT guy, who offered to get me Cakewalk at the employee discount - $79. I was far from home, so had to be content to repeatedly reading and re-reading the Cakewalk manual until I got back. Even then, I couldn't use the software right away, because PCs didn't come with MIDI interfaces back then, so I first had to go out and buy one. I already had two MIDI-equipped synthesizers, a Jupiter 8 and a Juno 106, and added a Yamaha TG-33 soon afterward. Audio was rendered onto a TEAC 3340S so I could add acoustic instruments and vocals, then mixed down to a Pioneer 2-track. All I had for drums was a crappy TR-808, which I used mainly for click tracks. Most of my compositions did not have drum tracks because I so despised the sound of that 808. Who'd have guessed it would be considered a "classic" today?

First episode of three..start saving up for the big auction...

I'm a big fan of everything OTS, including Pear. Sounds great and is easy to use. However, my favorite acoustic basses are in Trilian from Spectrasonics. Not only is the main upright really well-sampled, you also get three other acoustic basses in the package. All have the necessary woody airy tone, plus great slides and glissandos, the main features I look for in sampled basses, whether acoustic or electric. The only downside, IMO, is that Trilian is clumsier to program than OTS. Another often-overlooked plus with Trilian is it can be easily integrated with Omnisphere for some interesting layering possibilities.

You clearly haven't spent enough money on plugins, JB! 😁 As was suggested above, that claustrophobic effect has nothing to do with sample rates or plugins, but rather almost always comes down to one or more of the following: 1. Too much spackle between the cracks, with reverb and compression being the main offenders. Gotta leave little holes between the notes/hits. 2. Using a lot of thick synth tones and layers of distorted guitars that have been manipulated to sound wide on their own. It's counter-intuitive, but mono tracks make for the widest mixes, while lots of wide-stereo tracks actually dilute the overall sense of panorama. 3. Lack of contrast. Equality is fine as a social ideal, but it has no place in a mix. Trying to make every element equally loud, equally full-spectrum, equally dry or wet or equally broad - will add up to a wall of mush. Not everything needs reverb, not everything needs to sound great in solo, and not everything needs to be full-spectrum. 4. And of course, you can easily undo a good mix with bad mastering. Mastering should always be icing, never remedial. I've got a whole bunch of old mixes that suffer horribly from exactly the syndrome you describe. How I wish I could go back and re-do them! Sadly, all I can do is analyze them and swear to be less timid in the future. If it's to be panned left, then dammit, why not 100% left?

Playing around with the new Hammerstein feature...so far it's more confusing than enlightening. Of course, one can always consult the manual: Well, then. There ya go. Mystery solved. Currently reading this document, which purports to explain the method. Basically, it's a way to more accurately break down the harmonic components of a test signal. I'm having some difficulty because the top of the graph is 0 dB. This appears to be relative to the test signal amplitude, since lowering the signal does not change the display. That means if I place an EQ under test and apply a boost with it, the trace disappears off the top of PD's display. I'm missing something, I'm sure. Maybe a scaling option somewhere...

Just one of many reasons I live in the far north. Granted, up here we're missing out on many of the South's distinctive charms. Hookworm, killer bees, black widows, wild pigs, hurricanes and backwater sheriff's deputies. Good thing you folks have the music thing going for ya.

That would be a useful technique when playing with some tempo-challenged drummers. A buddy of mine plays solo with a drum machine, and has done so for decades. He's done it so long and has developed such a strict sense of rhythmic consistency that he now finds it frustrating to play with a live drummer. Fortunately, my band's drummer is rock-solid, tempo-wise. Unfortunately, once he decides on a particular tempo, there's no persuading him that it should be slower.

Does it do the same thing if you run Kontakt standalone? If you let it sit for a long time, do the files eventually show up? Does it do it on a brand-new project with nothing but Kontakt inserted? I can't imagine how a DAW could affect Kontakt's ability to populate the file list, as that's purely an interaction between Kontakt and the O/S. I've seen it take a long time before, but only after installing a new library, installing a library incorrectly, or having corrupt files within a library.

^^^ That would be my first guess, too. It's typical for plugins to either periodically go silent or insert a noise burst when they're in demo mode. Try bypassing each plugin in your vocal chain one-by-one and you'll probably identify which one it is. Crackles and pops are an indication that your CPU is sometimes unable to process data fast enough to keep the input or output buffers filled. When the data stream is interrupted, even for a millisecond, that manifests itself as a click or pop. There may be things you can do to help your CPU out, such as killing background processes (wifi adapters being the most notorious culprit) that are monopolizing the CPU. But the quickest solution is to increase buffer sizes, which gives the CPU more time to do its thing. Some people like to set buffers low (128 or less) while tracking and then bump them up for mixing. Personally, I just keep mine set to the maximum value (2048) all the time for convenience.

Unless you're doing contemporary R&B with lots of Cher-effect vocals, stay away from automatic pitch correction entirely. That includes Melodyne's algorithm, which is actually quite good. Always edit pitch by hand, and always determine where corrections are needed by ear alone, ignoring the visuals. That will get you the most transparent pitch correction possible. Great vocals simply don't need to be quantized to exact pitches any more than drums need to be quantized to exact ticks. Except for those genres that are built around machine-like precision, such as EDM. Listen to Paul McCartney or Paul Simon vocal tracks - both are masters of pitch, but neither are precisely on the note. Not ever.

Perhaps the most common mistake hobbyist composers routinely make: picking a tempo and stubbornly sticking to it for the whole song. Tempo changes are the easiest way to liven up a recording, especially if your base tracks are MIDI. Something as simple as a subliminal increase of one or two BPM on the chorus will make your track more interesting, even if the listener doesn't know why.

abacab, it could be worse. You could have a 20-year old copy Adobe Premier. My brother has worked at Adobe for decades. He came to the company back when they bought Aldus. He's a tech geek and not in marketing so he won't be embarrassed that I've outed him. As an employee he can buy software at cost, so I had him get me Audition and Premier. Premier just sucked something awful and I uninstalled it. Audition, though, seemed like a good investment. I had liked its shareware predecessor, and the idea of having it maintained and enhanced by a big corporation seemed like a good thing. Then they decided to go to the cloud with it. I was disappointed, but Audition 3 was still a good program and it still worked. At least, until I had to replace my computer after it was stolen. Audition didn't work anymore because it had to be authorized online and Adobe had taken down their authorization server. Instant obsolescence. Wouldn't Toyota or General Motors love to be able to remotely disable every car over 5 years old? Brilliant move. Luckily for me, Adobe still had a shred of conscience back then. They issued a universal license for Audition 3 users. I still use it to this day. I'm guessing some up-and-coming marketing dweeb stood in front of the conference table and pointed to a chart showing many AA3 users had not migrated to the new product, making the case that the company needed a heavier hand to keep its customers in line. And here we are. Will there ever be a consumer backlash? Not likely. After all, there are still Apple customers.

Sorry, all my fellow hippie dreamers, but here's how open source and shareware typically go... Cool Edit Pro (shareware) -> Adobe Audition (buy once) -> Adobe CC (subscription only). Yes, sometimes it does go the other way. The MP3 encoder is an example of that, but it's atypical. CbB users would do well to reflect on what a great deal they're getting.

That's literally why it's called "recording". It's supposed to be a record of a real event. We need a new term for whatever it is we do nowadays. "Construction"?

Yup, Dave's here and off his painkillers.