bitflipper

A true 60's icon.

My drives are littered with hundreds of "projects" that never got off the ground. My success rate for taking a doodle to finished song is less than 1%. 

Building a song from idea to completed composition within a DAW is a journey that can take surprising turns. I have some that I really like that began as nothing more than a synth pad but evolved into complex and interesting final products, guided by nothing more than "hmm, that sounds good" as a roadmap. Those successes, however, are the minority. Most just died because I didn't know where to take them next.

By contrast, the majority of songs I'm happy with began life far from a computer. Most began on a piano or acoustic guitar, and had already developed into a fully fleshed-out song before I ever sat down at the DAW. Of course, once they became digital they quickly wandered off into new and unanticipated directions. But they all started with a prepared framework, which has proven to be  the most common predictor of success. Or, at least, a finished product.

The beauty of the DAW is that we don't have to choose one methodology and stick with it. It can adapt to whatever process works for us. If that means jamming with your band for a month, recording it and picking out just the best bits for a song, then fine. If it means plunking down colored bars onto the PRV and randomly scrolling through synth presets, that's OK, too. Whatever works for you.

But what you don't want is to rely solely on serendipity to produce something you'll like. One of my favorite quotes is from Dwight David Eisenhower, famous for masterminding WWII military campaigns: "plans are useless, but planning is essential".
 

Does that stuff come in larger tubes? 

Suggestion: try throwing in one verse in French. Maybe even layer in some accordion. Seriously. For some reason the whole thing sounds French to me, and I like it.

%appdata% is just shorthand for \users\Your_Name\AppData\Roaming. Less typing, and less confusing when the person you're explaining this to doesn't actually log into Windows as "Your_Name".  You can simply type "%appdata%" as if it were part of the pathname. Also useful in batch files since the path works for all users.

If in doubt as to whether you've found the right log, check its datestamp. If it shows the file was created 2 minutes ago, chances are you've found the right one.

So yes, it looks like you are looking in the right log file. Bear in mind that each time you rescan with the log option turned on, the output is appended to any existing log. So the information you see at the top of the file is actually the oldest. I usually go to the bottom of the file (CTL-End) and then specify an upward search on the word "Logfile:" to skip up to the newest entries. Hit F3 to repeat the search, thus going backward in time within the log.

If there are no warnings or error messages in the log, but the DLL does show up, then we can assume those plugins probably initialized OK. (I use the weasel-word "probably" because there are very rare circumstances where a plugin init fails so hard that the scanner stops scanning.)

How are you assigning plugins? Do you use the browser or the context menu (right-clicking on the fx bin)?

Try a reset/rescan with the scan log enabled. Be sure to do the Reset.

The log file will be %appdata%\Cakewalk\Logs\VstScan.log

Open the log file in Notepad and search on any of your missing DLLs.

Just seeing the DLL appear in the log means the scanner was able to find it and the problem isn't your scan path list.

Keep searching for additional mentions of the DLL. If the DLL failed to initialize, there should be a clue in the log as to why it failed, e.g. a missing dependency or insufficient Windows permissions.

One other thing to check is the exclusion list. I think the Reset clears that list, but I don't know for sure. Plugins on the exclusion list (assuming you didn't manually exclude them) usually get there because they failed to scan the first time around. Open the scanner utility and click on the "Show Excluded" radio button.

2 hours ago, Milton Sica said:

Hello everyone, while the beta version or something like that doesn't come out, as I already said here, I started using REAPER and I've been impressed with the arsenal it has...I will not post the link here to avoid reprimands from the moderators of this group...

Nobody's gonna reprimand you for sharing this.

However, this particular thread is specifically for feedback on the current release and it's to everyone's benefit that we all try to stay on topic. 

I know, it may sound punitive, but I'd suggest the Coffee House as a better destination for posts like this.

I prefer to let others do my deprecating for me. Takes far less effort.

Zebralette was what convinced me to initially invest in Zebra2 back in, hmm, 2012? It's been my go-to synth ever since. 

Here's my very first experiment with Zebralette from back then. Bear in mind that this little guy is basically just a single oscillator! But Zebra's oscillators are pretty impressive even before you start applying modulation, effects, filters and its fancy envelope generators. Everything you hear in this ditty is Zebralette - no fx, not even EQ.

Needless to say, I will be purchasing Zebra3 on day one of its release.

On a related tangent, this YouTube music educator is worth checking out. While people like David Bennet address topics such as why Mixolydian mode isn't used often in pop music, this guy is all about chord progressions. Here he is dissecting Brian Wilson's key changes.

I see those little Chinese pickup trucks all over the Philippines, delivering everything from fish to concrete. I want one. But you can't buy them here. They are illegal. Sure, they're death traps. But cheap and seem to run forever.

A couple years ago my granddaughter took me to see Transiberian Orchestra as a Christmas present. I was looking forward to it more as just a fun outing with my granddaughter than anything else, since it was at a venue known for having the acoustics of an abandoned railway station.

But holy crap, was I in for a treat. It was a jaw-dropping performance by world-class players, great lighting and surprisingly intelligible sound. Featured a melodic Van der Graf generator, no less.

I did much better on David's earlier quizzes based on hearing only drums and only bass. Some of these are iconic and thus easy to identify, but I'm guessing at least a few will stump you.

I'm looking forward to his next installment, "Guess the Beatles song from the tambourine part". (Not a real thing. That's the comment I left under the YouTube video.)

https://www.amazon.com/Rhapsodies-Black-Exit-Eden/dp/B072ZDQ1VF/ref=sr_1_4?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.XB8vUdxXwImkS5Zq22TskKA7pplQmGeU4pw64WtSJ8gkjCm1ZuqNX7l63YEp8FUjMYrbDQcJdvnRKHzwdDNDzSXFPAhGru_awiXQfb2-oqw0JTT_aWk9QRdpQvUdphvxBu-fm6_Tii3XsCCj2wwD9d8l2IymFBo4c5Lovp902vbRYrOWFR020V5HAypo0UwlPA6VcvQ969SjCGGyCoR7fHRxbIniII-J4kH_Ziwswj0.oUDVmHtLkMaZsrysjQBEGEUySmKF8W1knc-YyN_oHf0&dib_tag=se&keywords=EXIT+EDEN&sr=8-4

Their most-recent release features Nightwish co-founder and ex-bassist Marko Hietala on one song. The video below is what drew me to this band. These days they're down to just three singers and shifting toward original material instead of covers. I actually like the covers better.

8 hours ago, craigb said:

...when I was doing some voice-overs for a trade-show video I simply used moving blankets clipped to things like a mobile laundry hanging rack...

At one point I had screwed planter hooks all over my ceiling for the purpose of hanging moving blankets. Somewhere around here I still have a box of U-Haul moving blankets I'd bought just for that purpose. They have convenient eyelets that fit over the hooks.

That was early in my acoustical journey, though, and at the time I did not yet understand the relationship between wavelengths and the thickness and density of absorbtive materials. By the time I'd moved from the bedroom to the garage I was able to apply what I'd learned and now sit in a forest of rigid fiberglass.

Still, there is some value to thin absorbers. They do work on reflections above 2KHz that tend to interfere with speech intelligibility. Certainly helpful in vocal booths, especially for voice-overs. Hopefully, it'll also help my bass player, who stands in front of said garage door at rehearsal, to locate those elusive pitches in his harmony parts.

Yes, it doesn't take much to render a conventional drive inoperational. But "operational" means running it in the normal fashion - connecting it to a controller and letting the O/S figure out where stuff is. There are indeed very small tolerances in there, and not just the tiny height that the heads fly over the platter. There is also a tiny stepper motor in there with a plastic actuator held on by screws the size of the ones in your glasses frames. The drives I worked on had linear accelerators - picture the coils in a speaker but with a 10" throw - that could be destroyed by dust or vibration.

So it's true that a particle of smoke can indeed ruin a drive as far as you or I are concerned. However, if you are, say, the CIA, or anybody else with a great deal of patience, it's still possible to recover data even after it's been damaged. As a last resort, there is a fluid that can be applied to the oxide that makes data visible  to the eye under a microscope.

My company used to sell hardware to the military and the 3-letter agencies. I had to learn about stuff like that in order to be certified for high-security installations. Did you know they can watch what you're typing by picking up electromagnetic leakage from the keyboard cable? Imagine working in a Faraday cage. No listening to the radio for you!

Fortunately, I never had to do a DOD install myself, only read up on it just in case. I had no desire to install a system whilst guys with guns watched. Out here in civilian land, it was mostly banks that were paranoid. Had to get my badge altered just to go the bathroom. But they were too clueless to think anything of it when I wheeled an HDA full of bank accounts right out the front door.

My biggest freebie score was a 6-foot tall rack, when my office closed down in 1993. All the furniture got snapped up, but I was the only one with a pickup who could haul away the rack. I ended up gifting it to a buddy of mine who had a proper recording studio and enough stuff to actually fill it up.

12 hours ago, John Vere said:

Have you considered a nice thick set of drapes?

Too expensive. I have exactly $193.01 to spend.

I started with $200 but downloaded an MP3 album for $6.99. A symphonic metal band from Sweden featuring four girl singers that does epic covers of 80's-era American Top 40 hits. Couldn't resist.

16 hours ago, kitekrazy said:

The problem with China is they steal patents and designs.  So far they are not good at stealing quality.

Here's a different take: what they are good at is cutting corners to lower the cost of manufacture. Long before China was flooding the world with cheap garbage, they were subcontracting for North American and European manufacturers. Working for foreign companies who stressed one prime directive: make it cheaply. Since that was their bread 'n butter, that became the nexus of their collective expertise.

Chinese engineers learn the same stuff in school as everybody else, so it's not like they suffer from mass incompetence. Every engineer learns the concept of "high quality, on-time, or cheap; pick two". When a trusted high-end brand such as Telefunken hired them to increase the profit margin for microphones, the engineers were given a clear mission - make an existing product that looked the same but was cheap to manufacture.  So they did. They came up with a microphone that looked exactly like a $3000 Telefunken but cost under $100 to make. Unfortunately, it did not sound like a Telefunken and when users tore them down they found that the guts of the mic were far inferior to the German-made original. You could in fact buy the same exact microphone under a Chinese brand for $150. It was the greedy executives at Telefunken who were the villains of that story.

The only thing that's changed is that the Chinese got smart and cut out the middle man, instead selling their cheap crap directly to consumers. Amazon made that possible.

Ever go magnet fishing? I had a blast doing that, using an extremely powerful magnet I was told was salvaged from an industrial magnetron. It had threaded bolt holes perfect for attaching a heavy rope.

Well, I enjoyed it until I snagged something too big to pull up. My magnet now sits at the bottom of an 800' deep lake in Idaho, probably attached to a steamboat that sank there a century ago and rumored to be laden with silver.

To be fair, I have no problem with meaningless brand names. What the hell is a Korg, anyway? First time I saw that name, I pictured a Japanese monster movie. Roland was a made-up name by a guy (Ikutaro Kakehashi) who didn't speak any English but wanted something that easily rolled off the tongue of an English speaker. 

A couple years ago, I purchased an extension cord. It was nice: all-metal construction, heavy 15' cable, 10 outlets spaced to accommodate wall warts. So when I recently added more powered speakers to my setup, I went to order two more of them. The exact model was no longer available, but there were four products that appeared to be identical, down to the bright yellow color. I didn't really take notice of the brand, which was CRST. Might have been a pun, as in Jesus Crst, what is this piece of sht? The ground pins literally fell off before they were even used.

I received multiple Amazon gift cards for Christmas, totaling $200. My office/studio/rehearsal space is a garage with a wood rollup door, the only surface lacking acoustical absorption. So I figured I'd spend my $200 on some stick-on acoustical panels. 

When I searched for acoustic treatments on Amazon, they showed page after page of acoustic foam products. All surprisingly cheap. Got my hopes up for about 10 seconds.

First thing I realized was that it was the same handful of products under dozens of different brand names. Names that are random strings of characters, such as WVOVW, OTUOER and ZHOJEREL. All with "customer" ratings of 4.7 stars. And all clearly useless, being too thin and apparently not even made of acoustical foam. We're talking the kind of low-grade lightweight packing foam you throw away.

All the product descriptions included the word "soundproofing" - a red flag in itself. I always go straight to the 1-star reviews on anything I buy from Amazon. Every one of them complained that these panels did not isolate sound. Those buyers had obviously been misled into thinking that's what these products are for. Many also complained that the panels came smushed into vacuum-sealed plastic bags and were malformed and squishy.

I had to explicitly search for "Auralex" to find any product that was not Chinese junk. Ultimately found a good deal, even though the panels were 5x more expensive than the fakes. But there was only one vendor selling Auralex, and that vendor was not Auralex. Some reviewers complained that what they got wasn't even actually Auralex. We'll see. Amazon does not seem to care if products they sell are fraudulent. (Example).

11 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

When we are doing dinner and other quiet sets, especially in small rooms, what I normally play on saxophone, can be played on my wind synth at a low volume with the same passion as my horn.

When we had a sax player in the band, that was an ongoing problem. Everybody could turn down except him. At low-volume rehearsals he'd sometimes turn away from the rest of us, but even then he'd still be too loud.

I was all set to buy him a wind controller. I am not wealthy, but I can fit almost anything into my budget if it makes the band sound better. Unfortunately (or  maybe fortunately), he left the band after a big argument with our singer. Those two had never gotten along from the get-go.

I still miss having a sax in the band. Playing those parts on a synthesizer is embarrassingly weak. Plus we can't make those lame jokes anymore, e.g. while he was switching from alto to tenor we'd fill the silence by explaining he was bi-saxual. Actually, on reflection I don't think he found those jokes very funny after the first time.

I like your attitude, Bob. If you hadn't become a musician, you might have landed at NASA instead. 

It does scare me how many single components my band relies on, any one of which could kill the show if they failed. For example, moving to electronic drums made a huge difference in the overall sound of the band, allowing us to play at literally any volume and still sound good. But should that drum "brain" (manufacturers apparently think drummers are too dumb to understand "sampler") ever fail, the drums make no sound at all. (Well, technically it still makes tiny ticky-ticky sounds, but I imagine that'd be difficult to dance to.)

What's wrong with this picture? Safety glasses, check. But (chortle) where's her goddam static strap?