bitflipper

Whenever my Dad was asked "how's life?", he'd always reply "beats the alternative". But when I reminded my deeply religious brother of that, he said "well, not necessarily". I will never get into a car with my brother. Or an airplane (he's a pilot).

YouTube has a lot of helpful beginner content, much of which was created by your soon-to-be new friends right here on this here forum. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cakewalk+tutorial This Deals subforum is just for helping us all spend money we don't have on things we don't need, so I'm going to move this thread to the Q&A subforum in the interest of tidiness and organization. Plus you should know that those of us who hang out here are, um, stricken by the heartbreak of G.A.S. and don't always exhibit the best judgement.

By that measure, I'm on an equal footing with thousands of successful band members with recording contracts and hit records. Actually, I'm doing better, having netted well over a dime just this weekend. Thanks for that pep talk, OJ.

"...the drummer who lost his front man and the front man who lost his drummer." Plus he just lost his mom. I guess, as Ringo sang, you gotta pay yer dues if you wanna sing the blues. Yet Dave always seems so upbeat and genuinely happy to be a working musician. At least if he dies it'll be from falling off a stage, not mental health issues.

I have tried so hard to like Tool. It's a genre that should be right up my alley. Sophisticated arrangements, intricate melodies, adventurous sounds, impressive musicianship. But for some reason it just doesn't click with me. I can appreciate it intellectually but there's no dopamine. OTOH, if I was ever imprisoned in North Korea and being tortured for state secrets, I'd still prefer being blasted with Tool over, say, Kid Rock.

Holy crap, was I beat when my head finally hit the pillow early this morning. Yesterday was a record-breaking 3-Mocha day. That's three Starbucks Iced Mochas in one day. I should have been bouncing of the walls, as I normally don't drink caffeine. We've really been gigging too much this summer, I think. The band's pretty tight now, but we're at that stage where it's all becoming rote muscle-memory. I'll catch my mind wandering mid-song, admiring a hot waitress, wondering if the forecast rain will hold off until after loadout, how I should feel about Pell grant recipients getting a $20,000 break on college tuition, and whether another Chernobyl-class nuclear disaster might be imminent. And then a brief panic when I suddenly realize that a) I've forgotten what song we were playing, b) I think I'm supposed to be soloing now, and c) how come we don't have a single jam in Am? I'll have to bring that up at next rehearsal.

Already finished my first gig for today. Played the state fair, spent my earnings on an overpriced sandwich and came home. Next up: get back into Friday afternoon traffic for a two-hour drive to tonight's gig on Camano Island. Normally, it's 45 minutes, but Friday afternoons it's bumper-to-bumper all the way. Yeh, it's thankless work, bringing culture to the masses. But it's my mission.

It's official: old music is outselling new stuff. A factor he doesn't mention is that four people create the bulk of all pop music nowadays.

I like t-shirts that are conversation-starters. I wore my last semi-whole CW shirt to a concert just last week and sure enough, somebody came up and told me he was a longtime CW user. But not a frequent forum visitor, so I invited him to stop by and type hi. My "College of Winterhold Alumni" tee also gets smiles and comments.

I long ago broke my Cakewalk mug, and all of my Cakewalk t-shirts have holes in them. So here's another vote for a merch page. While they're at it, maybe they could figure out a way to add CA2A back into the offerings. I've still got my copy from SONAR days, so I'm asking for a friend.

I paid $10 for my chair in 1993, and it was at least 10 years old at that time. The wheels aren't quite round anymore, but everything else is fine. Mainly, it does one thing very well: I can lean all the way back, put my feet on the desk and take a nap without fear of it tipping over. What more could you ask for in a chair? It also supports my back well. When I had my back problems, this chair was my only pain-free refuge. I suppose it must have been an expensive chair originally. The office was closing and they just wanted to get rid of everything. I also bought the desk I'm still using, also for ten bucks. It's military gray and made of steel. It has a drawer. It may seem odd that someone who has spent so many thousands of dollars on software, synths, amps, monitors and microphones is content to sit on a $10 chair. But if it doesn't make sound, it's not a priority. I'm using a microwave I bought in 1979. I'd probably still be wearing jeans from the 70's if my belly girth had remained constant.

Sheesh, the hours - no, days - wasted on the original DOOM for DOS. Back in the day I'd pack up my desktop computer and haul it over to a friend's house where we'd network our computers and play DOOM all day long. He lived in a high rise apartment building, and when leaving after a marathon session I noticed that when the elevator door opened I reflexively stepped to one side as if expecting an imp to step out. Not to brag, but I was unstoppable in deathmatch, even against the Microsoft guys who apparently did nothing else at the office all day except play DOOM. You don't want to go head-to-head with a piano player in a keyboard-controlled game. At my last real job in the 90's, I made a DOOM map of the campus where I worked. The boss found out about our game sessions and tasked me with writing a program that would seek out and destroy all games from employees' computers. Which I happily did. It freed up a lot of bandwidth for the IT department, resulting in better framerates for our own sessions. Despite my onetime obsession with DOOM, Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior, Redneck Rampage, etc. I've had no interest in run 'n gun shooters for some time. Skyrim ruined those types of games for me. Nowadays it's gotta be an open world, story-driven and strategic. Preferably one that supports modding.

"D***s will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no d***s" - The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Hmm. Anybody else see something worse than "drugs" in the censored version above?

I downloaded this library - 'cause why not - and gave it a test drive. Yikes. Not only is it big, the .nki loads damn near everything by default. 6.11 GB loaded, took several minutes. At first I couldn't figure out why only one mic position (there are 6) was working, then noticed in the Kontakt header that samples were still loading. I had already composed a test melody in less time than it took to fully load. Looks like I'd been overly generous before, assuming there must be many velocity layers. Wrong, most groups have only 1 layer. I'd also been overly generous in assuming there was no pitch stretching. Again, wrong. Most samples are stretched over 5 notes. I'd been overly optimistic in assuming there'd be multiple mallet types. There aren't. But what about those 45 audio sources that can be blended in? To be honest, I still haven't figured those out. Every one I've tried added an atonal layer that was not pleasing. I'll give it another hour to prove itself, then I'm reclaiming 7.61 GB of disk space back.

That comes out to an average of 1.2 MB per sample, which may seem high for a 4-octave instrument without a lot of articulations. Most of my piano libraries are smaller than that, but then pianos (usually) don't have the option of banging them with different kinds of hammers. Plus this library has 45 other sound sources beyond the xylophone. So yeh, the size is probably justified.

Here's something Cherry Audio has so far neglected to do - post some actual sounds. If you're hearing Oberheim-like sounds, it's those 12dB/octave filters. This synth also offers 24dB slopes for a more Moog-ish profile. Note that this video shows the actual synth upon which the Cherry emulation is based.

I think this would be a great synth for somebody new to synths who wants to learn how to create their own patches from scratch. It's got every parameter you'd expect in a classic subtractive synthesizer plus some not-so-common features, all laid out in a logical manner. Back in the day this would have been considered an exceptionally full-featured synth. Sure, modern soft synths include more sophisticated features, but that also makes the process of learning to program them more intimidating. Plus, it sounds really good.

I thought this might be a time-saver for learning new songs for the band, but I was unable to purchase using PayPal. Says "Developer Error: Something went wrong". Clearly, some serious thought went into error handling when designing this site. I guess they're doing me a favor, forcing me to figure stuff out the old-fashioned way (trial-and-argue-with-the-drummer).

Oh man, I know that sound. The good news is that there is a very good chance your data is (mostly) recoverable. That clicking noise is the drive performing RTZs (return to zero), a last-resort action it takes when it can't figure out where it is on the disk. If you're lucky it's a mechanical failure and the platters themselves are still OK. (If you're extremely unlucky, the heads have literally crashed into the drive surfaces and been dragged across the magnetic coating, leaving gouges on every track. In which case some of the data might still be recoverable, but it'll be an expensive operation. Expensive enough to justify the cost of an uninterruptible power supply to avoid such disasters in the future. )

Second only to the Beatles in the number of hits during the 60's. He co-wrote the only hit to chart 6 times (Keep Me Hangin' On) with 6 different artists. "Heat Wave", "Can't Hurry Love" and "Baby I Need Your Lovin'" are some that come to mind that had more than one trip up the Top 40.

Normally this would be excellent advice, but Annabelle is stuck with 8.5 because she is visually challenged and apparently the accessibility software she uses is only compatible with 8.5. Even if that wasn't the case, this issue is probably not the result of some old bug that's since been fixed. Annabelle, does the problem persist if you reduce the project to just the TTS-1 and its associated MIDI tracks? If so, we'd be glad to examine your project and help identify the problem. You could upload the project file to DropBox, or if that's problematic zip it up and email it to me. I still have 8.5 installed here.

BBE Sonic Maximizer

I got their newest model, called Alpha 80 Evo. It is close to the absolute bottom of the Focal product line. Focals for po' folk, you might say. Definitely not comparable to the S3s. However, if I did have S3-level money to spend I'd probably favor the high-end Focals over the high-end ADAMs. But it's like imagining Lamborghini vs. Ferrari if I won the lottery.

Hi, Jerry. Wonderful stuff, as always. Today my new Focals arrived, so I spent the first couple hours listening to my favorite Deutsche Gramophone recordings to get a feel for the new speakers. As expected, they sounded great. Next step, pull up one of Jerry's pieces. Guess what? This one stacks up with the best references I have on hand. On top of being a fine composer, you are also a bona fide Audio Engineer. You probably keep your lawn manicured as well, and squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom like a civilized person.

Thanks, I enjoyed that. But does anybody else hear Chris Farley when Joe speaks?