StudioNSFW

"China Girl" - David Bowie

I think the problem will be that a vintage analog synth seems to be something that is desirable for some reason and so the price is high on the used market for anything any good. Years back I had a Korg MP-4 that I bought at a pawn shop for something like $20 because I convinced them it was just broken (actually you just needed to know how to tune it). Sold it a few years later to a collector for $300. Great little Mono synth, the Poly version was incredibly crappy sounding.

"Eye of the Tiger" - Survivor

"All Over The World" - Electric Light Orchestra

"War" - Joan Osbourne

That chipset limitation is not in the newest platforms coming down the road by a long haul, but again, thats pretty specialized stuff today and wont be mainstream for a year or more. Today the big NVMe solutions use internal NVMe switches to drive more parralelization to the individual calls. More lanes from AMD will see a much cleaner architecture that they've committed to.

Live sound guys LOVE the Bass Pod Pro. i got mine after one of the sound engineers for Gaylord just gushed about it to me. Pretty cool alternative to a plain jane DI to the PA. Also, the Owners manual ("Pilot Handbook") is about the coolest piece of technical documentation I have ever read.

There is zero difference between a dedicated slot vs a stand up adapter card so long as the PCIe slot it is in has enough lanes. I recently learned that the newest AMD architectures are much more lane heavy than the iIntel platforms around and are advantaged there. That may be specific to some new platform stuff happening in the enterprise storage world but its for real there for sure. NVMe is NOT a storage medium, to be clear, it is a transport layer like SATA or SAS.

Honestly I have not - I do a lot of work outside the box and seldom feel the need to re-amp if I am playing the bass track as these old amps are completely understood (and my goto is my beloved Bassman 10 through that old Tone Ring cabinet, NOT the SVT). In the past when I was working much more in audio and had another player in, most of the time is seemed like they were booking the studio for access to the amps, especially the B15n. I have used the IK straight into the VS-700 instrument input for some cowpunk stuff recently and ...yeah, good enough that I haven't looked any further. Playing out live on the other hand, the SVT is worth the load in/load out struggle...at least it is while I am playing. I curse it roundly during load in and load out.

For me the concern in Win7 is more some theoretical zero day coming up that renders that system exploitable, and then that is used to traverse the network to a place where the sensitive data actually lives. Odds are small but I was paid to be paranoid for a long time and still have those reflexes. Given my network topology, it would take a targeted attack to get very far...but I have similar concerns for IoT devices like my whiz bang LED light bulbs that can be controllled via wifi. So I have a seperate IoT Wifi environment for those things...because you cant spell "Idiot" without IoT...

Nothing really compares to playing through a "Real" SVT for the instrument dynamics that I have found - there is a certain natural compression to the tube pre-amp that translates to how it handles different amplitude level of playing soft vs hard (from passive pickups anyway) that I have never felt on any emulation no matter how much they claimed to have modeled the original circuit. I call it "Smoosh" and just chalk it up to "Analog vs. Digital" That said, there is also nothing compared to having to move or lift a "Real" SVT either. And if you ever play in a band with a SVT AND an B3 - I guarantee every gig you will book will be on the second floor with a broken elevator. (been there, done that, had the hernia surgery) And Ampeg somehow manages to consistently make the heaviest cabinets with the worst casters in the industry. You also could license every possible emulator and still save money on what a re-tube would re-cost. All that said, the IK sounds pretty fine for what it is. I've used it in a pinch but generally I mic the real thing and mix it with the DI signal old school style.

erm...Linux *On the desktop* is generally not great for an user OS (but may be awesome for a software developer or networking ninja). Doing A DAW for it is silly for the above mentioned reasons. BUT!! There are commercial systems running on Linux that are capable of a degree of tuning, scalability and availability not even possible with the monolithic, closed Windows kernal. Nimble Storage and Qumulo are two with which I am intimately familiar. Both are enabled because of the power and modularity of Linux BUT neither are "Open Sores" software. If you compile a bog standard LTS kernal, strip out everything that is not needed for what the computer is intended for you generally have a very stable and lightweight OS tuned for that task. A very different situation than a desktop OS that is asked to have a GUI and be a web browser, word processor, media hub, pr0n player, gaming machine and DAW. Choice of OS just comes down to what you need *that* machine to do. And THAT is why I am running Win-DOHs 7 for my DAW, Mac OS for almost everything else including graphics, photography, video production and post. IF CbB was available for Mac I probably wouldn't even have a Win-DOHs desktop machine... but then again, some of the most cutting edge editorial post houses in the world for video have slid onto Windows across the board in their workstations due to much superior SMB performance.

I may have finally be out-nerded which is hard to do... Logged onto my first "internet" session in 1975 in the basement of the Lawrence Hall of Science at Berkeley (Go Bears!) at the tender age of 10. Ther system I was on was what became BSD Unix. First Linux Distro was RedHat 5 almost 20 years later- but I eventually ended up specializing in data storage and spend my time talking about storage protocols and media and architecture. There currently isn't a single Linux machine in the studio at all, everything is Mac other than the DAW and a MacPro running VMWare ESX (more virtualized MAcs and Windohs machines inside) , and the controllers of the Nimble SAN which run on a Linux kernal. An actual Linux server is located in a Colo somewhere in another part of the world. My $.02 - there is an ecosystem around a DAW of Interfaces, VSTs etc. So, it's not just a question of whether any particular DAW can be refactored to run in the linux system, but also if there is driver support for the rest of the ecosystem. From a lot of experience, if you want to tinker and debug and tune an application for the satisfaction of "Making it work", then Linux is the way to go. But if you just need things to work reliably every time then commercial software is a smarter choice than "Open Sores" software. And Craig - I am confident we have at least one mutual friend from your early days.

Richard...

"Gene and Eddie" - The Stray Cats

"1952 Vincent Black Lightning" - Richard Thompson

"Last Dance" - Donna Summer

"Ode to Billy Joe" - Bobbie Gentry

5/4 is actuallyDave Brubeck day.

For video post the issue isn’t your cpu as much as it’s the throughput of the storage, If your current system isn’t equipped with a NVMe drive or two dropped frames will be a constant problem once you start working in 4K.

My understanding (Potientially inaccurate) is the CbB and other DAWS don't "Thread out" the way Video post does. If that is the case, CPU clock speed matters more than core count - unlike Video post and especially VFX, Animation rendering and Video Games which do a lot of floating point stuff and benefits from the huge core counts in GPU. I'm Intel here, but that is more like I have NGK sparkplugs in my motorcycle because that was what the bike shop had. I went with a Laptop i7 chip (5500 IIRC - Dual Core + Hyperthreading) ) on a ASUS PC style Mobo, primarily because of the power consumption/thermal profile of the chip - silence from the PC is a big thing to me because of where it has to live. It's not very powerful, but doesn't seem to struggle with multiple softsynths and VSTs. I get away with a very small buffer size and latency is so close to real time thatI have stopped worrying about it. Only time I will get an "Audio Engine Stopped" is when bringing up the interface of a VST during playback, which I don't think is CPU related so much as just a programatic resource conflict. Perhaps my small buffer bliss is a combination of a great I/O device (the VS-700) and the fact that the DAW is not ever asked to do anything BUT be a DAW. It runs on a singe SATA SSD; Rather than multiple disks in the DAW, I have an iSCSI mount to a Volume on the Nimble Storage, which is stupidly insanely fast enterprise class block storage (aka SAN) located in a server rack on another floor and far away from the Audio studio.

"Trick or Treat" - Elvira

Looks like the VS-20 suffers from the same lack of manufacturer support as the VS-700. You'll need to hack the driver and turn off driver signature enforcement to get it to install. Although written for the VS-700. these same steps should work for your VS-20 http://forum.cakewalk.com/How-to-use-V700-win-8-driver-in-win-10-also-applies-to-some-other-Roland-drivers-m3206046.aspx

"Incense and Peppermints" - The Strawberry Alarm Clock

"OK, that's the MIDI track. Now you need an Audio track for the output..."