bitflipper

Yeh, what was this about again? Oh yeh, France. My Focals say thank you.

When I worked in the tech industry, one of the aspects that appealed to me was its meritocratic nature. Status and respect was not a product of political maneuvering, but rather based purely on whether or not you knew your sh*t. But in any meritocracy, strata do naturally form. There was always that one field engineer who didn't know squat and couldn't seem to ever fix anything without assistance. In my office we had a software support analyst whose sole qualification appeared to be that she was cute and flirty. Sure, we all flirted with her, but never gave her anything resembling respect. At the top of the food chain were the ubergeeks, who almost never got stumped, and whenever they did get a tough problem to crack they leaped on it like a kid attacking a piñata. Below them were the frontline troops who kept customers happy. Perhaps not coincidentally, a great many of them were also musicians. Below that were the middle managers, who kept the rest of us happy by providing a buffer between us and Corporate. Most of them were ex-geeks themselves who understood our tribulations. But the absolute bottom tier was Marketing. Even coming in below Sales. At least the sales guys were entertaining. Heck, I even had good relationships with those sourpusses in Legal. But the marketing folks were looked down upon by everyone in the hierarchy, including customers. Part of the resentment was due to the fact that they were some of the highest-paid people in the whole organization, despite not knowing their sh*t. If flew in the face of nerd culture. Whenever they came to me for technical support, I made them pay me $20. Which, to my surprise, they happily did. But those were my corporate cubicle days. Cakewalk isn't like that. Sure Noel's top dog, and not because of his sparkling personality or impressive guitar chops. No, this ubergeek knows his sh*t. Paulo, when you say "rudderless", what you're really describing is an organization ruled by geeks, not marketing weenies. I'll take that model any day.

I have heard no discussion of pricing, but fully expect a deeply discounted initial release. That's just SOP in the industry. I could be surprised, though. What if the price is based on your Coffee House post count? Bapu had better start saving up now.

I've heard that. Always assumed it was a neighbor a couple blocks over, learning to play drop-C bass.

"Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." - Bob Seger "Reality is what it is, not what you wish it was." - Frank Zappa "Beware of the fish people" - Also Frank

And one notorious a-hole. It's a revolving title, though, so you'll have to figure out on your own who it is this week.

Now, now...it smells much better nowadays! (Context for those who don't know: Tacoma used to have a lot of pulp mills, and the sulfur smell would waft all the way to Seattle and beyond. My home town of Everett had the same problem, but the pulp mills went away here, too - although it does remain the toilet paper capital of the US. We prefer to talk about airplanes.)

Well, of course you bought a Grunge pedal in Seattle, home of Grunge. Whenever I visit Tacoma, my tradition is to spend a reflective hour or so sitting in traffic whilst slowly creeping toward the other side of town. Tacoma, home of the perpetual traffic jam. And yeh, consider it an open invitation to stop by and visit next time you're up my way.

Someday, NASA will find human bodies mysteriously floating in space on the other side of the sun. The logical conclusion: time travel will be invented sometime in the future, but they won't take into account that the planet won't be in the same place at any given time.

Byron's probably right about this not being a bug, based on the lack of reports of what would have been a showstopper. If it's user error, though, I have no idea what a user might accidentally do that would cause such behavior. The effect you're describing is the result of a sample rate mismatch, but this is a very rare occurrence and almost always involves imported audio. It is unlikely that a SR conversion would happen on an internally-generated file such as a bounced track. (Current versions do support per-plugin upsampling, but X1 did not have this feature.) I'd first eliminate the possibility of a misbehaving plugin. Try deleting (not just bypassing) all plugins on the track before converting to mono or stereo and see if that makes a difference. If the problem goes away, try the experiment again with each deleted plugin reinstated until you've isolated the problem plugin.

Oh, it's already a thing.

The story I read was that the library started out as a personal project to solve a real-world problem, rather than as a commercial enterprise. Her piano was a key (!) component of her recorded sound, but impractical to take on tour. It was probably her engineer or producer who suggested sampling it for that reason. It was sampled by her own crew at her own studio. Nowadays for gigs she often plays "her piano" via a MIDI keyboard. My guess is that some marketer heard the story and figured the pun was just too good to pass up. I remember thinking it was a lame gimmick when the product was first announced, and was as surprised as everyone else when it turned out to be pretty good.

Yeh, it is kinda girlie. But hey, so's Alicia. She's even been public about it, referring to herself explicitly as a girl, albeit one who's on fire. Maybe it would have sold better with a black and blood-red theme, maybe an image of bloodthirsty Vikings swarming out of the gates of hell. On motorcycles. Now that would be a manly piano library. Fortunately, it would sound the same either way.

Almost 40 years ago I bought my first acoustic piano, a baby grand made in Korea by Yeoung Chang. It was the most expensive thing I'd ever purchased short of my first home, so I had to finance it over 10 years. While I was in the piano store waiting for the contract to be drawn up, I walked around the room plinking on every piano in there. When I sat down at one of them, the hairs on my arms stood up. It was incredibly responsive and had a lightning-fast action. But it was the amazing tone that got me excited, bright and harmonically rich. I ran to the sales office and said "hold everything! I fear I'm about to make a big mistake - I have found the perfect piano!". The salesman barely looked up from the paperwork when he said "that piano's $60,000". OK then, carry on I said, crushed. This was in the mid-80's. For perspective, my aforementioned house had cost $43K. That piano was a Yamaha C7. Many years later, I'd come to acquire multiple sampled Yamahas. For a whole lot less money. It's still my favorite piano tone for rock 'n roll. Alicia's Keys is sampled from a similar model. Although itself a rarity (only a few were ever built), at its heart it's that classic Yamaha sound. When you hit a low note, it's got some real gravity to it. You just want to play the theme from Jaws. For $13, I am tempted to pick this one up despite having three or four nice Yamaha libraries already.

I don't want to live in a world where you need an app to light a fire. I do, however, admit to having an app for my refrigerator. It doesn't do anything the device's own controls can't do, but it does have this funny feature where you get a text message if the door remains open for too long. Why is that funny? Well, my grandson set up the app on his phone when he lived here, because, um, he's of that generation that doesn't question why you'd need one. He's since moved away, so I smile every time the fridge beeps at me for leaving the door open too long - because I know my grandson is getting a notification on the other side of town.

Actually, it's the opposite. Volume control has been the key to landing repeat gigs - bartenders and servers love us for that. We can get loud when necessary, e.g. outdoor stages, but it's all in the mains. With every instrument running direct through the PA, I literally have a master volume control for the whole band. But what we hear on stage is consistently low-volume, the same volume we rehearse at. Electronic drums are what makes it all possible. The seeming overkill of using QSCs for monitoring is actually so that we hear a clean, full-spectrum representation of what's going out to the crowd. Of course, my carefully-engineered scheme falls apart whenever we play venues that provide the PA and monitors. That, unfortunately, accounts for about 50% of our gigs. Those can be quite uncomfortable, especially when some tone-deaf FoH guy assumes 120dBSPL is just about right for a 200-cap room.

I made the mistake of starting with a folding tripod-style table (made by Samson, iirc) because it was compact. But it kept falling over. At one point it dumped my mixer onto the concrete floor in my garage and took out one of the mixer's channels. Another time it bent the power supply connector on another mixer, making it impossible to disconnect. So when I invested significant money in a compact digital mixer I was determined to never let anything bad happen to it. Here's what I'm using now. It's lightweight but quite solid and stable, height-adjustable and folds up flat for packing in the van. Those speakers look like a nice solution. I have used similar powered speakers, the ones made by Bose. I was amazed at how you could place them anywhere and not get feedback. Their only drawback was we couldn't get a whole lot of volume from them. But for low-volume gigs they sounded lovely. No distortion despite handling keyboards, guitar, drum machine and two vocals. My monitor strategy these days is to run mine (QSC K8.2) at low volume but up close. It sits atop a speaker stand about 18" from my ear. Being a PA speaker, it's full bandwidth, which is important because I am often mixing the band from the stage and need to hear the full mix (keys, guitar, drums, bass and vox) in the same proportions that are coming out the mains. I only wish QSC made a 6" version that wouldn't block my view of the audience as much. I totally understand. It provides a depth and texture that you don't normally hear in live performances, and therefore makes you stand out from the crowd. It sounds great with my own PA, but unfortunately I often play venues with house systems that aren't stereo. Or for that matter, anything close to high-fidelity. Pearls before swine. But if I was, say, playing in a house band in a quiet restaurant with quality reinforcement, then I'd absolutely revisit Omnisphere. As well as Keyscape, for its electric pianos, and the IKM Hammond, and probably Zebra2 for synth leads. Sadly, that's not my world. Well, your first mistake is "refusing to go broke in the process". I gave up on that principle a while ago. That old washer/dryer makes grinding noises but still has a few years left, I can live with that leaky faucet a while longer, and my car is Italian and therefore built to last forever. I agree, using a controller that's designed for abuse by musicians is probably a much better idea than using a laptop. Assuming, of course, that it's rugged enough to be a key piece of your rig. Or cheap enough that you can afford a spare. I would definitely advise buying a nice padded hardshell case for it if it's going to travel at all. When I think about it, it scares me how many individual devices I have that could halt a show should they fail. So I try not to think about that.

I tried posting with crayons, but editing is a b*tch.

I used Omnisphere on a laptop for a few months, as well as VB3. It didn't work out as well as I'd imagined it would and I eventually gave up on the idea. The first issue I ran into was getting audio out of the laptop. I did not want to complicate the setup by adding an external interface, so that meant taking output from the headphone jack. I wasn't concerned that the audio might be less pristine than from a proper interface - it's live, after all. The biggest issue was that the connection was unreliable or intermittent, with the cable often falling out due to the weight of the adapter, requiring that it be taped down. Second issue was where to situate the laptop. At the time I was using two or three keyboards, in an L shape rather than stacked. I also ran sound, so that meant a mixer had to be situated next to me. Add a monitor on a stand (I can't hear floor monitors due to the keys blocking them) and now I'm taking up more stage space than even the drummer. There really wasn't anyplace to set the laptop where it was easily reachable and physically secure. That latter concern came to light when the little table I was using fell over and the laptop went crashing to the floor. Then I realized that Windows is just not friendly to real-time applications. At one point, it wanted to perform an update, so I had to stop everything and tell it "not now". Fortunately, that happened during sound check and not mid-performance. Because my laptop also served other purposes, I had not stripped it down to bare essentials. It still had antivirus running, for example. If I forgot to disable the network, it would interrupt me with messages that it couldn't download email or couldn't reconnect drives. I would not trust a laptop to be a critical component. It's also very clumsy to use a touchpad to select patches on a soft synth. A mouse is even worse. You really need a separate programmable MIDI controller, one more thing you have to figure out where to put. Another minor, but unanticipated issue is that when audiences see a computer on stage they assume you're playing to backing tracks. We don't do that. I will never, ever do that. I want them to know that everything they hear is being created in real time. What ultimately pushed me to abandon the idea was the extra setup time it added. I already had multiple instruments, pedal effects, stereo keyboard amplification and a PA system to set up. It took me over an hour. More if it was a challenging space, e.g. a corner or small area. Forget 15-minute turnarounds in a festival setting. Nowadays I've trimmed my gear back quite a bit - two keyboards, stacked, no external fx, no separate amplification. Setup time is now 30-40 minutes. I still require a lot of space compared to, say, a bass player. But it's do-able, even in cramped spaces. As far as special MIDI concerns, my first challenge came when I wanted to use a single sustain pedal for both keyboards. At first, I tried making a Y cable, but that never worked right. The solution was to pass CC64 events (and only CC64) from one keyboard to the other. The second challenge was switching between layering the two keyboards versus playing them independently. Fortunately, one of the keyboards provides a fairly easy way to do both, so it became my master device even though it was my secondary instrument. The third challenge was controlling a vocal effect via MIDI from a keyboard, which appears to be impossible due to the lack of MIDI options within the effect, e.g. no way to disable troublesome CC events. Every time I'd switch the Leslie speed, the effect treated it like a patch change. I'm still looking for a solution to that issue that doesn't involve more devices (you can buy an inline MIDI filter, for example). In the same vein, you also have to make sure that your laptop-hosted soft synths are configured to ignore patch change events unless you have a separate keyboard dedicated to soft synths. None of this is relevant if computer-based synths are your whole show. You could get a rack-mounted computer and use a single inexpensive MIDI controller. Total cost would be a little less than a high-end synth. But even then I'd want a spare laptop along. Bottom line: for live performance you want the simplest, cleanest, most reliable configuration that gets the job done. Using a computer complicates things.

Maybe this is why they had to change the name of Gearslutz.

I started a fresh project last week, hand-planted a click track in the PRV to drive the TTS-1, and chose a Kontakt library to serve as the voice for a basic guide track. But when it came time to record said guide track, I couldn't record any MIDI. I switched to a different keyboard controller to see if I'd screwed up something in my main synth's configuration (I have a special setup for live music and have to reconfigure for recording). Still no MIDI coming in. Checked my Sonar MIDI settings but couldn't see any problems there, which was expected given that I never change it. Tried a different soft synth just in case it was Kontakt being weird, but that wasn't it, either. Could my trusty Focusrite be at fault? Geez, I hoped not. But this is my third interface, the previous two having died, so that was a possibility. But I needed to exhaust every other possibility before making that leap. I am running a beta version of Sonar, so as with a brand-new car anything's possible. But an older version yielded the same results, so it wasn't that, either. So I did what I always do when I'm stumped: lit up a bowl and stared at the screen while drawing a MIDI flowchart in my mind. At each potential point of failure, I mentally drew a red X over each one that had already eliminated, until almost every possibility had been accounted for. Almost. The only thing left was the line drawn between the synth and the interface. "No way", I said to myself. MIDI cables don't break. Well, it turns out that sometimes they do.

Yeh, they used to do that. I attended a session at Guitar Center in Seattle, c. 2005/2006. It was pretty good. GC supplied the venue and sold a bunch of stuff as a result. I distinctly remember seeing one of the attendees afterward holding a pair of brand-new Yamaha monitors under his arms, being picked up by his wife at the curb, grinning from ear to ear. I remember wondering if his wife was going to be as enthusiastic as he was, and thinking "good for you, stranger - I hope you put your foot down and let her know that your happiness counts for something, too".

I actually passed on seeing the Beatles in 1966, even though they were my favorite band at the time. The reason? The concert cost an exorbitant $5 with no opening act. That seemed excessive at a time when a typical arena show would feature 8-10 bands, each of which had a current or recent Top 40 hit, for an admission price of $2. In those days, a whole five bucks would cover a night out, including gas, drive-in movie and burgers. Which is how I chose to spend my precious fiver. I told my gf we'd see them when they came back through town the following year, which they never did. Sheesh, Ed, you're we're OLD.

Holy crap, abortio* pills of all things. A new low even for those miscreants. Wookie must have slept in today. I just deleted 14 spam posts and banned three users. Those dipsh*ts are making work for me. I don't like it one bit.

As the article explains, most people who fall victim to this scam will never know it's happened. The scammers create a made-up artist and then use bots to continuously play the song so that they can then collect payments from streaming services. The only way the scammers might get caught would be to issue a takedown request, because only then would the original artist find out about it. That seems like a pretty dumb move. This particular outfit, FUGA, does look sketchy. Their website's front page includes no information, but it does display programming mistakes (e.g. the word "<footer>" ). In the terms & conditions, the sentence "You shall be solely responsible for your own content and the consequences of submitted the content to FUGA." might suggest that they don't verify squat. And have plausible deniability if caught out. It'll be interesting to see who initiated the dispute, and will hopefully reveal the scam organization - assuming it's not FUGA itself.