mettelus

That wire is definitely an antenna, but make sure you know where it really goes before playing with it. The rest of the wiring in the house can be acting similarly to your environment. Since your house is of the older 2-wire style, it would be worth your time to go through the breaker box and verify circuits (I *hope* you are not fuse-panel, but you could be). Heavy appliances with motors (refrigerator, AC units, fluorescent lighting, furnace) and things you turn on (vacuums, microwaves) can all be feeding back into the house itself. You can control most of those, but the ones that kick on automatically (refrigerator and furnace) are ones you may want to check for feedback. *If* the refrigerator being on/off is a noticeable difference, that is one appliance you may want to make sure is offline when recording. It also made me wonder with the GFCI comment... where is the ground on that running? If connected to a 2-wire circuit, it may still not have a ground.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. Chandler has done a lot of awesome tutorials, but most stay on the start screen (not his specifically, but in general). Most of Melda's plugins go far beyond that screen, and AFAIK there is only one tutorial on multiparameters, which is one of the most powerful features. Ironically, many people purchase plugins based on curb appeal rather than processing power (and complex GUIs can actually limit audio processing capability from the CPU hit), so Melda is a little downplayed in that regard. The only feature that I feel is lacking is the cross-communication between plugins of the same type (ala FabFilter and iZotope). Just to inject a little reality here for spectators ... From a practical perspective, plugins are akin to instruments; i.e., it is easy to buy something "new and flashy" with the expectation that things will drastically improve. It is far better to master plugins you own than to be on a constant quest for something better, and included plugins are more than adequate in the right hands. After our Gibson debacle, I wanted a minimalist plugin set that was not locked to any DAW, so I can pick and choose which DAW I use with a familiar set of tools. This is not to say that is a fit for others, by was my reaction to that event.

One big plus is that they base plugins on a common design, so you won't shift from one to another and be totally lost. When I got this new machine I didn't load anything but Melda and iZotope, so the fun learning game is when a new FX gets touted I go searching for how to do that with Melda. Flashy plugins that have a steep upgrade cost have serious competition. Some of those suites would pay for Melda's Complete Bundle during their 50% off sales... Difference is you pay to upgrade the other guys, but Melda gives the upgrades to you. I am still on the iZotope upgrade train, but Melda takes care of most everything else... VSTis... those are a different story...

Interesting read about Intel's move to keep Thunderbolt 3 royalty free. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/thunderbolt-3-becomes-usb4-as-intels-interconnect-goes-royalty-free/?amp=1

Best answer to your own question. 😊 Make a list of what you want/don't want and give Jim a call. You most certainly can build your own, but it is up to you if you want to deal with the research to find all the components, build, and tweak it. If you do go that route, steer clear of anything pre-fab from a big vendor (HP, DELL, etc.) and get Win 10 Pro. FWIW, Jim built Noel a machine a few years back and did trouble-shooting through one of the holidays IIRC. Noel posted a rather nice review of all that Jim did on the old forum, but I cannot find that post offhand. This forum has always been a trusted source of advice for me over the years. It is pretty common to see folks first ask "what are you trying to achieve?" rather than blindly sell you something.

MXXX has a wild "wow" factor to it, but in practical application I haven't used it as much as I thought I would. MXXX Core would be easier path for some to nit-pick at extras with the Eternal Madness deals. Regarding the 50% off bundle deals mentioned above; when I got mine, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Melda gives a % credit for things you already own. I assume this still holds true, so keeping plugins you own now will benefit you when the 50% off bundle deals hit. The subscription model does not count towards those 50% off bundle deals... AFAICT, once on-board it seems you need to ride that to the end. With a little patience and one-offing things during the Madness Deals, things end up being more cost-effective in the long run to getting the Complete Bundle. Disclaimer: I cannot check the "credit for previously purchased plugins" anymore, but that should be easy to verify by adding the Complete Bundle to your cart and see what they give you credit for. I assume that still holds true, since Melda is very good about not selling you the same plugin twice (they are about the only company I know of who won't).

In order to use the onboard sound (Realtek), you may need to go into W10 Device Manager, go down to "Sound, video, and game controllers" and specifically right click on the SoundBlaster and "Disable Device." Having those driver in play will confuse Windows. Do not uninstall it... W10 will just re-install and re-enable it on you. As mentioned above, both WASAPI "shared" (I also agree this is best choice) and ASIO4ALL will work in CbB for audio playback, but they will not for recording audio. I have run both of these modes for mixing, and recording MIDI and they work fine. These will both conflict with the SB drivers if you do not specifically disable that device. I would also go into "Sound" in the Control Panel, highlight the Realtek, then "Properties" in the lower right. In the "Advanced" tab, set it to "24-bit, 44100 HZ (Studio Quality)," and make sure that both "Exclusive Modes" at the bottom of that tab are unchecked. CbB should default to 24/44.1 unless you changed that, so the RealTek should "match" and not have issues playing back through the RealTek. ALSO... some applications will seize the audio drivers and lock bit-rate on you, so when working as a DAW, be sure to open the DAW first (if you must multi-task), but I highly recommended that you only run the DAW if working in "DAW-mode." As someone who first came into this forum 15 years ago for essentially the same reasoning as the OP, as much as you want to fight a "real" audio interface, you will find that futile (for recording audio). If working with only MIDI and audio playback, both WASAPI and ASIO4ALL will suffice if using CbB.

LOL, that is a good summary of things. As I am playing with T10, I realized that I got this new machine about 10 weeks after getting the T8 deal and never installed it on this computer. While plying with T10, I tore into Collective and Biotek seriously for the first time, and I really like those guys. Turned out, the T10 demo comes with the versions I owned from T8, so they authorized. Long story short... I *assumed* that both of these were locked to Tracktion but found out that regardless of what installation path you choose, they install to C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VstPlugins. Once I added that path to VST scans in SO4 and CbB, they pop up for use. 😁 I am still having a very difficult time clicking with Tracktion's workflow, so will see how this plays out; but the two things I really wanted (Collective and BioTek (1)) from this demo I realized I already had. Just a quick FYI for folks, since I have never had the Steinberg plugin path in my VST scans... It won't hurt to add that path if not already done. AAS is the only other verdor I have that seems to install a duplicate there, even though I told it not to.

That is a good deal. For those who are not familiar with iZotope, their deals often have "from any advanced product" as a pricing option for bundles and such. This is a good opportunity to get into that pricing bracket if not there already.

Another endorsement for Jim. He has been a member of this community for a LONG time, and streamlining PCs for music production is his forte (all of the bullet points in the OP). He is great person to touch base with if not outright buy from, since he will cater a system to your specific needs. He ships his machines with the unnecessary Windows apps disabled and optimized for music production specifically. As far as "power, speed, memory"... an i7-8th generation CPU with 16GB of RAM is one of the more cost-effective builds these days. Just in case you have need for more RAM going forward, getting two 8-GB RAM sticks initially will allow you to double RAM to 32GB by only buying two more (i.e., you can still use the initial 2 purchased that way). In my experience, 32GB was overkill, and 8GB isn't enough once a project gets into the mixing stages.

Edit: DOH! Read that wrong on my phone, answered for the wrong plugin, sorry.

Thanks for the clarification. It made me think when I saw that picture that indexing errors can lead to such situations, especially if off by an integer value. Index values start at zero, and that picture looks like the audio is set one frame forward (index starting at 1, rather than zero). It may be coincidence, but I was led to believe the padding was akin to an audio buffer in size, but a full frame is 1600+ samples, which is far more than I expected to see. I am not sure if an indexing error is at play here, but "one full frame" is suspicious.

I do not work with video, so that last picture caught me offguard. I was expecting to see "sample offset" but that appears to be "ms offset." It looks like it is off half a frame (~16.7 ms)... Am I interpretting that correctly? Is that offset exactly a frame interval (1/2, etc.)... meaning if the audio was shifted by a frame interval, would it be synced properly?

This is known for mp3s, and the lead padding is variable depending on the specific file (no set offset will solve it). Unfortunately that padding is front-loaded, which is why sending mp3s for collaboration can cause a headache without an audio transient to align to. I can only assume this is similar for compressed video, so the advice above to convert to uncompressed prior to editing would be wise.

I got 8 during the Gibson debacle, and demo'd 9 but the layout didn't click with me and I was too lazy to dedicate time to it. That new sampler did stick out, since there are very few "quick and dirty" ways to do loop backs via software. They seem to be putting some real effort into features, so I will give them another go. I need to actually make something with it rather than just screwing around testing features. 😳

Doh! Thank you, lol. Good thing that wasn't a car or I would have been hit.

That RX7 Breath Control has a look ahead buffer on it, IIRC. What that means is it needs to see what is coming to react in a smooth fashion, so ”real time” it is forced to delay the rest of the project. Some FX are only designed for mixing, and others have a ”low latency” setting on them, or even ”low CPU” if you need to track with them enabled. I am not sure if RX7 has those, but it is something to be aware of... both look ahead buffers and high CPU hit will mess up tracking. Global FX bypass is a quick solution for most cases.

I downloaded the demo, but not used it much yet. Does the upgrade apply for the 8 versions as well? I couldn't find info on the "upgrade" aspect. Looks like some features got inspiration from other DAWs, but no harm in that. One thing that really stands out is the quality of their web page and videos. Their marketing folks are really on the ball with that stuff. Very nicely done on both fronts.

That is one of the weirder things I have seen. The "Building Transient List" flashes so quickly I had to download the gif and go through the frames to make sure that was what it said. Are any files (these "transient lists") being saved when it is doing that? That may be easier to search for files "modified today" after it finishes whatever it is doing. Overall that is very confusing, since there is no need for a transient list to play anything, and if it was making such a thing I would expect it to be real-time (or just prior to playing). I am also curious if that is really CbB or a plugin. Either way, I am not getting "the point" of what it says it is doing. Edit: I just tried that out and those flashing messages do appear when cycling through wav files with the browser prior to playing some (about 50%) of the files I previewed, but CbB otherwise closed cleanly for me (no residual work going on). No files saved that I could find with this.

That video is a great overview of how the internal caching functions, both in theory, and under (extreme) testing. His point about "intended use" is also very valid in that the average user isn't going to be stress-testing writes to the drive, which allows the drive to clean up its caching between uses. For this, you will not see significant performance issues for reading if the cells have only been written to once (when you are done copying them). But as shown in the video, if you try to write ALL libraries to the drive at once (his test was a 230GB file copy), you will see the write hit when the cache gets saturated. Basically, the drive is setting aside a portion of itself to use SLC (1/4 density) as a "fast cache" to give the slower QLC writes time to catch up. If it gets filled quicker than the QLC writes, you will start seeing QLC speeds until the drive has enough idle time to "re-orient itself." Initially the drive is 250GB as "SLC," but as you fill it that cache will drop proportionally to 1/4 of the free disk space. Once written, it shouldn't be anything noticeable to you for reading samples from it, which is your intended use.

Best advice is to download the demo and kick the tires for yourself. Regardless of input here, this will come down to you. The "What's New" at the bottom of the product page is a good place to start. Personally, I was a bit underwhelmed by TH-U, so will hold off on it. It seems the "Rig-To-Model" technology is not something they plan to release, which is unfortunate since a lot of folks have amps they cannot continuously (or ever for some) run at wide open throttle and/or want to capture their studio space.

A lot of things will linger on an OS drive (temp files, log files, dump files, Windows updates (which can be rather massive), etc.), or be installed to odd places (e.g., XLN installs to ProgramData) unless user intervention occurs. A few great utilities exist to monitor folder sizes (I personally use TreeSize Free - Administrator), which are excellent tools to see what is eating up your OS drive. There is a thread on the old forum called "Optimizing an SSD" that has a bit more detail for this. I did a high-level look at junction creation in post #8 on that thread which hopefully can still help folks curious how to keep the OS drive lean. Again, the only concern that I have with large OS drives is the time they take to image/restore, and the size of that image.

I think that is the crux of the OP... a 1TB drive should be used, especially if fast, otherwise is extreme overkill (and waste of money) to leave it mostly empty. In that situation a 200GB "C" drive partitioned to an 800GB "Sample Drive" would make a lot of sense. Imaging the C partition would be small and quick, and the rest of the drive could be used for "fast read" material.

That board is similar to mine. You have two M.2 slots on the motherboard and the M.2_1 socket (page 1-2 just below the CPU) can be set to X4 mode in UEFI (BIOS) at the expense of losing SATA 5/6 connections (M.2_1 Configuration on page 50) . You want the faster NVMe in that slot if using x4, but will lose SATA 5/6 in doing so (essentially two drive slots).

Unlike SATA connectors, M.2 slots are far more limited in most machines. This is one situation where a partition argument would make sense. You want the most bang capacity-wise from those limited M.2 connections (fast and big), but at the same time keep the OS size "reasonable."