Gary Carey

I replaced my laptop with a mini PC some months back and reclaimed valuable desk space. Performance has been absolutely fine. Songwriter demo projects up to 40-ish tracks still normally give low enough latency to overdub guitar and keyboards. 

Can't remember the exact specs off the top of my head and won't be able to check for a few days as I'm away from home. (Back on the laptop!). It wasn't anything special regarding processor. I do keep this dedicated as a music computer though. Operating system is Windows 11.

The fan isn't noisy and only ramps up every now and then.  Overall I've been very pleased. 

Definitely out of tune - on the first C major chord, for example, the root note is sharp. Also, there's quite an unpleasant tone. I've used Amplesound in the past and never heard anything like this.

If I picked up a guitar and it sounded like this I'd re-tune, and probably replace the strings. Could the samples be corrupted in any way? The overtones sound muddy and there's a 'beat' in the chords like you'd get on an out of tune or wrongly intonated instrument.  The voicings are fine from what the chord box is showing. Something odd going on sound-wise.

19 hours ago, Pathfinder said:

They read like nice mics. Very inexpensive. I would be interested more in the OC18-did you ever use one of those?

Thanks

Hi, I haven't tried the OC18 as I don't need the pad or additional roll-off setting. Happy to save a bit of money to spend on other gear! On paper the OC18 has lower self noise and higher sensitivity. Probably the big advantage of the OC18 is that any two off the shelf mics can be used as a matched pair, tolerances are higher. Austrian Audio say the capsules are tuned differently but all the reviews I've read give the impression they are very similar in sound.

After buying my OC16 I came across the following review on YouTube. Warren Huart's comments are very much in agreement with what I found. (Ignore the sound quality on his spoken bits - apparently the video editor used noise reduction which created some artifacts. Lovely music track to listen to, though).  

Any guitar strap which comes with an instruction manual is too technical for me. ?

I'll second the recommendation for Austrian Audio. The capsule in the OC18 is hand made in Vienna by ex AKG people. The same capsule, tuned slightly differently, is also used in the OC16. If you're OK with just cardiod pattern and a three position roll-off switch the OC16 offers a lot of 414-style mic for a very keen price. 

Two observations about the OC16. I'm spending much less time dealing with sibilance issues when mixing, it tames it nicely yet still sounds clear in the top end. Plus I get a good, neutral acoustic guitar sound. For my own projects I could happily use just the one mic if needed. (Although where's the fun in that? )

I'm a big Overloud fan, love their reverbs especially. TH-U is my favourite amp simulator ( I have several) for getting bread and butter sounds quickly.

There's a sale on their website at the moment. For anyone who records acoustic guitars you might like to take a look at the 'BM Pro Acoustic' Rig Library. I want to go back and re-mix all my guitar tracks now! 

I'm very happy with the SSL 2+. It's been rock solid,  has an efficient driver, and comes with a good selection of bundled software. The SSL 2 is even better priced if you don't need the extra features of the plus model.

Make sure to consider how you'll be using your interface. For example, the SSL 2+ has all the connections on the back. Ideal for my preference and desk layout but won't suit everyone. 

On 7/3/2024 at 4:37 PM, Glenn Stanton said:

still working for me. even with the .vst3 extension... ? maybe try a re-install and make sure you have proper permissions on the plugin folder as well as perhaps using run as admin in the install? sometimes user level installs into program file folders don't always behave as expected - MS at it's best trying to secure your desktop from you... ? 

True Iron - my only Kazrog plugin - working fine here. Updated in the last few days. 

Hope you get that sorted soon Steve.

Not time-limited, no nag screens. Good basic sounds, especially for a free instrument.

It's a player and comes with a very useable acoustic drum kit. There's a variety of presets, which all have an info panel to suggest the genre of music they're best suited to. There are enough options to let you fine tune each kit element and save your tweaked kits as new presets. 

Like most drum VSTs you have a library of groove patterns, I'd say these are mainly useable and not too busy. 

You can purchase additional drum kits and grooves. (I suppose the point of player software is to get you to buy in to their eco-system). Once you have more than just a single kit you're able to mix-and-match elements, swapping the snare drum for example. I already had Addictive Drums 2 but the BFD player was included with my SSL interface bundle so I thought I'd give it a try. And yes, worth installing.

Easy to get to grips with and fast to use. While this doesn't have the bells and whistles of the flagship BFD software there's enough control and tweakability for me. I've got the factory kit plus a Pop Essentials (I think?) expansion and I've used both on demos with pleasing results. CPU load seems quite light, too, though I haven't measured it.  

It's free, why not give it a try. I'm having fun with it.

On 2/21/2024 at 8:45 PM, msmcleod said:

I pretty much always use the plugin browser search nowadays, typing in 3 or 4 characters of the plugin name usually narrows it down to a small enough list for me to spot it and drag it in... and I've got nearly 2000 plugins on one of my machines.

Two thousand! I'm impressed you can remember which one to search for. ?

Original post asks if dropping the input level to the master bus is OK. That's what I was saying would be fine, sorry if it wasn't clearly expressed. However, if there's no audible artifacts I don't worry about the visuals.  I lost any nervousness about red lights quite some time ago. 

3 hours ago, John Vere said:

This is wrong. The OP said they were overloading the Master bus. Pulling down the fader does not fix this issue.  If you don't believe me just turn on the Prochannel EQ and you'll see the red light. 

Notice  the red indicator in the EQ and the bypass toggle

. 

If I pull the Fader down it's still overloading the bus

But with the Fader at Unity and now I turn down the input gain that solves the overload issue. 

The Loud Max limiter will easily fix this but it's being fed an overloaded signal so that's not good. Even though I don't EQ my master I often turn it on just for that indicator. I can also then use it like Span for a spectrograph of the frequencies. 

Hi John. 

We're using 32-bit floating point, so the full range audio can be recovered by dropping the fader.  Provided everything is in the box there's no problem.

This YouTube video explains it better than I could: 

If you've not already done it, just full down the Master fader.You won't hurt anything as long as each individual track sounds good.