bitflipper

On the upside, dementia does allow you to enjoy your old record collection as if they were all new. Wouldn't you like to hear Dark Side of the Moon or In The Court of the Crimson King for the first time again?

What's the big deal? That software compressor is a model of a piece of hardware designed 70 years ago that hasn't had substantial revisions since. And the emulation is pretty good. It's not going to stop working. There was an update earlier this year to my longtime go-to FET-style compressor (PSP FetPressor). Cool, I thought. Maybe they're adding some modern features such as a dry/wet mix knob. Nope. The "update" was that they were making it dependent on Pace. Big Nope. I backrevved to the previous version. If they never update it again it won't bother me at all. It's great as-is.

I'm putting a lot of hope into that being true. My father, his mother, his sister and my mom's mom all died from Alzheimer's. Every time I forget where I left my keys, I panic a little.

Last night I met a fellow who's been playing piano for 32 years, with a penchant for honky-tonk. He's the bartender and owner of last night's venue. 32 years on the keys, but get this: he only took up the piano at age 60. I can only hope that I have as many intact brain cells at 92. Interesting guy. I suspect he has mob ties. Meeting him was the highlight of the evening. Lake City Way used to be a major highway into and out of Seattle. Nowadays it's one of those too-busy "stroads", a daily rush hour traffic jam and site of many accidents. Reminds me of Hayward, CA with a few more trees. But sandwiched between the chain retailers and car dealerships there sits an anachronistic anomaly that bills itself as "Seattle's Last Roadhouse". Built in 1932 and looking like it hasn't seen many major improvements since then, it's a local landmark. I've driven past it hundreds of times and never really given it a second thought beyond "you don't see places like that anymore". There's no readerboard, just a small hand-made sign out front that reads "Live Music Tonight". This place is unusual for several reasons. They're only open one day a week, from 7:30 till midnight. They don't serve food or mixed drinks, just beer and wine. It exists solely for live music. Guests pay $10 to get in. There's a large dance floor but most of the patrons sit and listen to the band, and applaud enthusiastically. As well as generously feed the tip jar. It was a treat. Looking forward to going back there. Owner John Spaccoratelli:

Software written for a specific operating system can take advantage of any and every feature that O/S offers. Windows has made great strides with low-(kernel)level audio support, much of it based on solicited input from expert users such as Noel. This is why WASAPI Exclusive Mode is a viable alternative to ASIO. Cakewalk's close association with Microsoft meant, for example, that classic Sonar was always immediately ready for each new version of Windows on Day 1. When you write cross-platform software, you have to take a much more generic approach and are often forced to make compromises in order to maintain a common code base. Optimization is harder. Testing is harder. You are going to have to hire experts in each of the supported operating systems. Development generally takes longer, so you're less able to turn around quick fixes and enhancements like we've become accustomed to.

That's a pretty good summation. This is pure speculation, but I can imagine Next far exceeding Sonar in the size of its user base and the two products having a similar relationship as Cubase is to Nuendo. It will be a long while before Next has a comparable breadth and depth of features to Sonar, but over the next couple years it'll cover more and more of the same bases. By then it will have become a viable alternative to Sonar for the majority of music creators who have no interest in becoming audio engineers, at a lower price point and gentler learning curve for new users.

Yeh, you just missed it. There have been many pleas, not for new plugins, but for the return of old favorites. Some that come to mind from recent posts (as recent as last month) are CA2A, Dimension Pro, Adaptive Limiter, Z3ta and LP-64. Most of us old-timers still have them, but the user base has expanded greatly since the demise of classic Sonar. Some of the old bundled plugins were licensed from third parties (e.g. PerfectSpace, Pantheon, Breverb). Couldn't sustain that with a free DAW. Some of the old favorites were made by now-defunct companies (e.g. VC-64), so they're out. However, Cakewalk actually owned the code for some of them, or they were developed in-house. Those are the ones most likely to return, now that Cakewalk's hiring. Cakewalk, I believe, outright owns the Sonitus suite (having bought Ultrafunc, its developer). It'd be nice to see those great plugins spiffed up with bigger UIs and a few bugs ironed out. Oddly, no one has asked for Guitar Rig LE. (C'mon, it wasn't that bad!) A legitimate argument can be made that nobody really needs those, given the cornucopia of free and cheap plugins out in the world today. But they were a good value for someone just getting started.

Logic and Reason have left the chat.

I'm not battling anyone, nor am I blindly defending my preferred DAW. Just basic troubleshooting while trying to avoid a classic causation vs. correlation logical fallacy. Let me explain my reasoning, and feel free to correct any logical errors I may make in the process. Let's start at the beginning, by looking at what a c0000005 error is, and how it comes to be raised. This particular error code represents an access violation, which means the software has attempted to write to an address location that it does not have permission to write to. Usually, this is the result of an uninitialized pointer, a variable that contains a memory address but that hasn't been given a value. Because all variables initially default to zero, the pointer is pointing at address 0. Although 0 is a valid memory address, it's in a part of memory that's reserved for the operating system kernel and cannot be written to by user applications. The O/S protects itself by refusing the operation and raising an error so that the offending application can deal with it. How does a pointer get initialized? That's up to the programmer who wrote the code. That's why it's safe to assume that a c0000005 error is a bug in the code that raised it, and ultimately human error. I apologize if you knew all that already, but it's important to understand how this error happens and why. The key concept is in your statement that "...This is not the only plugin that has generated a c0000005...". The salient point is that it was the plugin that attempted to write to protected memory, not the DAW. The error was raised by the plugin, not the DAW. Granted, the plugin may have been referencing an invalid pointer that the DAW supplied it with, that's not impossible. However, any pointers passed to the plugin (e.g. input and output buffers) would be the same pointers the host passes to all plugins. If they were invalid, the DAW would crash every time you attempted to use any VST plugin. From a software developer's perspective, it is always the module's responsibility to validate arguments, and to never assume that the caller guarantees they are valid. Usually, that means the plugin will refuse the invalid pointer and notify the host that the call has failed, in which case the host would be tasked with processing the error. When this is the case, it won't be the plugin that was identified as the offending module in the dump, but rather the DAW. But if the stack dump shows a plugin's DLL as the failing module, then that's where the problem originated.

Absolutely. Well, there's that one guy who's kind of a jerk. But the rest of them are A-OK.

I could send you a screenshot, but it would be the same resolution as my 2560x1080 monitor. I'm told it looks pretty good. OK, here ya go...snipped from the About Box.

Preach, brother. I remember when Waves gave away their products for free, then after five years started demanding money for them. Um, wait. I may be mis-remembering a few details. Cannabis: it's nature's preview of dementia.

That orange actually looks pretty good here, on a dark-themed browser, on an actual monitor. I don't know how you guys can do anything on a friggin' phone. I tried that a couple times while killing time in a doctor's waiting room. That lasted about 2 minutes before I looked around and found a two-year-old copy of Time magazine. Since then I take a book with me.

What is this "music store" you speak of? My music retailer is online, and their air conditioning consists of a desk fan.

I had a humorous interaction with my car dealership this morning. I wanted to schedule service because my A/C isn't working. However, they now insist that such appointments be made online. I'm no Luddite, so I went there and began entering my information. However, I got nowhere when it came to selecting a date and time, as there were no clickable links anywhere on the page. Then I noticed in the corner of the screen a generic stock photo of a smiling lady with the caption "Hello, I'm Scarlett. Is there anything I can help you with?". So I type into the chat window: I am having no luck scheduling a service appt. via the online scheduler. Can you do that for me? Scarlett then replies: Hi my name is Scarlett. It’s great to have you with us! After a long pause, "Scarlett" adds: Hey! To assist you in scheduling a service appointment, here is the link to our service scheduling tool: [link to the same page where I started] Is there anything else I can do for you? My reply: I am now confident that A.I. will not be taking over the world. Thank You. Scarlett: You’re welcome. It's been a pleasure serving you today. Thank you for visiting us. Have a great time! Yes, Scarlett, I did indeed have a great time. Unfortunately, the forecast is for "hot", and for tomorrow "hotter still", and I have no A/C in my car. But I am happy that I was able to give you pleasure. BTW, the reason I couldn't schedule an appointment is that there were no slots open through most of the summer. I'll have A/C by October.

So do some of your audio plugins, whether they advertise it or not. That's partly why your Melda and FabFilter stuff is so CPU-efficient.

In the beginning I was referring to it as "New Sonar", but that sounds too much like "New Coke", and we all remember how that went. I propose that we refer to the new product simply as "Sonar". If you need to differentiate from pre-BandLab Sonar editions, call those "Classic Sonar". That's a suggested component, not a hard requirement. I can assure you that Sonar's running just fine here on a 6-core Ryzen CPU.

I'm still on Ozone 7. The mastering aids that have been added since then are features I would have been excited about 10-15 years ago, but have since realized are mostly useless.

Finally, somebody said it out loud.

Since they took away Insight from the Advanced bundle, the main advantage now over the standard edition is getting each of Ozone's modules as individual plugins. I very rarely use Ozone's individual plugins. I think you could find better things to spend that $124 on. Of course, that's just my opinion. You can compare the Standard and Advanced editions here.

I think that's an add-on, also back-ordered with estimated availability in 2039, or after the global AI takeover, whichever comes first.

Some of you older guys might remember ordering X-Ray Specs from the back of a comic book...remember how you'd check the mailbox every day but it took so long to arrive that by the time it got there you'd forgotten ordering it? Well, that's how I'm feeling right now. After much research and deliberation, I bit the bullet and ordered this fancy little digital mixer. Unfortunately, it's back ordered and Sweetwater will only say it'll be "a few months". 9" touch screen. 18 inputs, 8 aux outs, parametric EQ, compressors and gates on every channel and every output. 8 reverbs, 4 delays, plus the usual chorus, etc. Patch anything to anything. DAW controls and full MIDI control. Motorized faders, 200 scenes, Dante-ready should I ever need it. All in a tiny (12.6" x 18") package, same size as the little MG12UX analog mixer I'm using now. Yeh, the whole thing's overkill but hey, I'm old - and well, like they say, you can't take it with you. So f*k it, I'm gonna enjoy my golden years with awesome toys.

You might know this fellow for his song Bad Things that was used as the theme for the TV show True Blood. That's a good tune, but not the only goodie on the superbly-produced Red Revelations album. It's in of my collection of references.

I believe the enclosure is just too small to get the full benefit of 8" woofers. I got spoiled with my Emotivas, which had incredible low end. They were also much larger and heavier than the Focals. They also had more powerful (1KW x 2) amplifiers. The Focals start to distort at high volume. Of course, I don't mix at high volume, but do crank them when the band is in here learning a new cover song and we're listening to the original recordings for inspiration. One thing I do like about the Focals is the wide sweet spot. My previous speakers, including the ADAM P11As that preceded the Emotivas, had folded ribbon tweeters. Those are exceptionally flat but laser-focused, requiring you to precisely triangulate on them with your ears to hear them properly. To anyone elsewhere in the room they sound dull. But you can't beat them for accuracy. I miss that.

I've been using Focal Alpha 80 Evos for the past year. I'd always admired Focals but they were just too expensive. Then last year the amplifiers crapped out in my Emotivas (my all-time favorites, but sadly discontinued and no longer available) and I had to scramble to replace them without having money set aside in advance. Focal had just come out with this model and I hadn't heard them, but I trusted that Focal wouldn't risk their reputation by putting garbage on the market. And they were listed at an amazing price of $500 each. At a grand for the pair they'd be the cheapest monitors I'd ever bought. Long story short, they are not impressive. They do the job, and I've become accustomed to them. But gosh, I miss folded-ribbon tweeters.