Starship Krupa

I won't be able to think of all of them immediately. I've been into different genres over the years so what's influenced me has depended on what music I am making at the time. (I promise I'm not goofing like I think T Boog was, my tastes really are this weird. I have a ticket to see Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass and Other Delights tour in Los Angeles this November, which will require me to drive about 7 hours each way between Oakland and LA) Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass: Four Sider My Bloody Valentine: Loveless Brasil '66: Herb Alpert Presents Bettie Serveert: Palomine The Ramones' first three albums Pink Floyd: Meddle (specifically "One of These Days....") Terry Riley: In C Lush: Gala Neu: 2 Air: Moon Safari The Beatles: Revolver Sugar: Copper Blue The Who: The Who By Numbers Brian Eno: Discreet Music Ulrich Schnauss: A Strangely Isolated Place Gang of Four: Entertainment! Com Truise: Persuasion System The Orb: Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld The Moody Blues: This is the Moody Blues (actually all of the "core seven" albums) The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground & Nico Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures The Beach Boys: Surf's Up (actually all of their output from Pet Sounds through Holland) Those are the first ones that come to mind. I'll often do a song and only notice who it was influenced by later.

IMO, that is still a valid system for running CbB and Sonar. One of the Cakewalk devs, Mark MacLeod, uses an i7-3770 system in his studio, as did I up until a couple of years ago. You will see a HUGE improvement in speed changing your system and programs drive to an SSD. If your motherboard's BIOS supports booting from them, installing a PCIe NVMe adaptor (they are cheap, under $10 at Amazon) with a 500GB NVMe is the best investment. When the time comes to build a new system, you can use the NVMe drive in that build, so it's in no way money thrown away. If your BIOS doesn't support booting from an NVMe, even switching to a SATA SSD will give you a massive speed increase in boot and program loading. I use Clonezilla for drive cloning. Regarding Windows 11 compatibility, you have choices. First, there are well-known ways to trick a non-compatible system into upgrading Windows 10 to Windows 11. Second, if you're concerned about security issues, you can keep Windows 10 and use a 3rd-party malware solution.

I think what it comes down to (for me) is what a work is vs. what it's being presented as. I thank T Boog for sharing just how wronged a fan can feel, even decades later, upon finding out that they had been misled about exactly whose work they were consuming. From the start of my music fandom, the genres I've been into weren't as much about the appreciation of a certain player's technical prowess as 80's metal. I didn't usually even know who played what. But now I get how if you're presenting your music as having been played by the people in your band, and their technical prowess is hyped as a way to sell records, and they become your heroes and influences, that it could feel like your trust was violated and exploited. Music is important to a lot of people, especially teenagers in their formative years who are looking for role models. Daft Punk's "Digital Love" is one of my favorite songs of all time. When it came out, an anime fan friend of mine told me about it, that they had worked with the guy who did Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers on the video, so I found it online and checked it out. I was almost 40, had just bought my house, and I still choke up when I remember how I was emotionally transported back in time 30 years to the time when I loved The Archies, Josie and the Pussycats, The Banana Splits, etc. Also Supertramp a few years after that. There's a video that breaks down where most of the samples they used came from, and when I first watched it, I admit I was initially a bit taken aback by just how much of the song was based on/assembled from other people's recordings. It inspired me to take a look at my own notions about such things and to ease up. Bottom line is that they didn't sell the record as being anything else. They were a pair of friendly robots consuming what they heard and reassembling it to make their own music. That was their product, and it was/is amazing. If a song could make a middle-aged man feel like he was 8 years old again, who CARES where the individual ideas came from? I still have ego problems about using mostly presets for all of the synths (and creative FX) I own. But I had a conversation with Lorene "Produce Aisle" about that when I was doing a remix of one of her songs and she put into perspective with a cooking analogy: do you have to grow all of your own spices in order to be an "authentic" chef? Heck, the top chefs in the most prominent restaurants don't even usually do any actual cooking. @Rain, I hear ya about being a guitarist and feeling like using something other than my own carefully crafted guitar tone is also "cheating." I used to have my own one-person boutique stompbox company, as well as having designed a tube amp on commission that was shown at NAMM. So using "in the box" amp sims makes me feel a bit icky. But y'know, whatever I use, in the end it will still be a tone choice I made (or in your case agreed to), and more importantly, my playing reacting in real time to what I'm hearing. And we gotta serve the songs more than we protect our own egos, right? That's what I hear, anyway.😄 Good analogy about Michelangelo. No matter whose hands crafted how much of it, if the true creative force was in charge, it's a Michelangelo, or Warhol, or Walt Disney, or Hayao Miyazaki. I still do find it kinda weird that The Beatles had someone else do the leads on a song that George Harrison wrote about playing guitar....😏

Here's where I'll confess that while I like Gilmour's playing up through around Wish You Were Here, in later days I thought he had too much of a tendency to go with blues cliche solos that went on too long. His work on "One of These Days...." is still amazing. Floyd were of course not strangers to featuring guests, they called in a guest vocalist, Roy Harper, for "Have a Cigar," and of course Clare Torry was so integral to "The Great Gig in the Sky" that she fought for, and won, a writing credit. While I'm talking about guest performances, one of my favorites is Jerry Scheff playing bass on "Riders on the Storm." The Doors' bass player was usually Ray Manzarek's Left Hand. Anyway, apologies, the video's topic isn't about credited guest performances, it's about what is "authentic." If there are people on YouTube faking performances and selling them as being done live in real time to show what awesome players they are, that's lame as hell. People who do it should be called out.

Fightin' words in some circles. Tread carefully.😄 As a drummer myself, I've tried to copy some of Ringo's playing and, um, it don't come easy, so to speak. "Love Me Do" on the other hand....that beat is easy peasy. I've listened to all 3 versions of "Love Me Do." Pete Best demonstrates that the reason he was booted was NOT because the girls liked him. Andy White sounds great, pushes the beat a bit for more excitement. With Ringo, it sounds most like The Beatles. As a bass player who is very sensitive to speeding up or slowing down, I have mad respect for how solid Ringo's time was. McCartney has said this. When you're playing bass with a drummer who is that metronomically solid, you can relax and groove, play with your own feel. This was in an era when drummers weren't playing to a click. Nowadays, some drummers play to a click live. Regarding Gilmour, I didn't know (or had forgotten) that they used another guitarist on some of the rhythm parts on The Wall. Not surprising given the producer. If a record didn't have Hunter and/or Wagner on it somewhere, it just wasn't a Bob Ezrin production.😄 Seriously, fans would have known what they were getting: you hire Ezrin, Steve and Dick will be on the record somewhere. Regarding Hunter/Wagner, I still get a chuckle out of the "Sweet Jane" intro on Lou Reed's Rock 'n' Roll Animal. For a LONG time, I thought they were two different songs, and that the intro was an Allman Brothers instrumental. My mind couldn't even connect the two, despite the fact that you never heard one without the other. TBF, there's no clue that "Intro" is live, then "Sweet Jane" is obviously live.

I think with some of this stuff, it's people trying to justify their salary. George Martin was one of the greats. Ringo Starr is one of the greats. Yet George Martin forced The Beatles to use a session drummer on their first hit single. Is the "Love Me Do" beat that hard to nail? I do like the song better when it includes Ringo's tambourine. I will give it to George that it might take him a little time to get up to speed. Did people care who played what on pop records in the early 60's?

So you were part of the fanbase that got duped. That really sucks. For sure, metal isn't supposed to be a genre where you use uncredited ringers. It's supposed to be the opposite of and refuge from "Milli Vanilli 5hit." An "is nothing sacred" reaction is understandable. There are so few people and enterprises we can even begin to see as having integrity.

My man, I have sold myself out for so much less than the guys in Warrant did. Getting paid peanuts by jerka55 drug addict or rageaholic bosses? Yep. I didn't develop the self respect necessary to get a good job until I got clean and sober 35 years ago. I even put in a full year at one legendary audio hardware company where the owner hired me mostly because he liked straight boys and thought I was cute. Everyone in the place knew this except for me. Until I figured it out.🙄 So yeah. Don't most people at some point do things that we'd rather not in order to survive? Maybe not. I can only say that I have. I did abandon one potential career, radio deejay, because I had the opportunity to hang out at a radio station and learn how radio programming actually worked, that the deejays themselves had to obey the program director, they usually had little latitude to choose what they were going to play. I realized that I could never tolerate that and ended my pursuit of such a career. I remember watching WKRP in Cincinnati and not realizing that Andy was supposed to be the protagonist. I hated him and thought Johnny Fever was supposed to be the hero of the whole thing. It was decades before I figured it out: that ***** Andy was supposed to be the hero! Johnny Fever was this cranky burnout who was an obstacle to Andy making WKRP as successful as it might have been. Yeah, I was not temperamentally suited for the commercial radio business and I am forever grateful to my younger self for realizing that before I had invested anything. Perhaps not. Can't fluff pop like that be marketed anonymously, though? I think that formula was more common and accepted in Europe. The guy who put Milli Vanilli together had already had huge success for the past dozen years with an act called Boney M. where he recorded the male lead vocals and hired 2 male and 2 female singer/dancers to do the donkey work of actually, y'know, being Boney M. Everybody knew it, nobody cared. It wasn't the kind of music where people cared about such details. But Milli Vanilli became big in the US and won that damn Grammy award. You know, the same organization that bestowed Best Heavy Metal Album upon a Jethro Tull disc. If their success had been confined to the UK and Europe, where people knew the producer for having already created a popular fake band, there probably would have been no controversy. One of the weirdest things, to the American mind, about Boney M. was that the guy who actually sang on the records was German while the performers were of various other nationalities and all of African descent. I just can't help but think that that fact might have rubbed some people the wrong way in the US. White singer/producer of dance music hires black people to perform as him? Uhhhhhh.... I think you're probably right, and I also think that that right there is your "price to be paid." How about you get to fulfill your dreams of becoming a rock star guitar hero except it's not going to be your playing that your fans will fall in love with, and you'll have to pretend that it is? The most you get to do is learn someone else's parts so you can play them live, making you sort of your own tribute band. Sound like a dream turned nightmare? It kind of does to me. It was probably its own punishment. I would imagine that Joey and Erik would have been interviewed by musicians' magazines like Guitar Player and would have had to pretend to the writers (who at GP were also guitarists) that it was their playing on the records. And signing autographs for kids telling them that they were their favorite guitarists. Eek. That sounds awful to me. But really, if your (as you put it) "family" is pressuring you to step aside, set your ego aside for the good of the band, and nobody has any idea how long this rock and roll enterprise called Warrant is going to keep generating income (it's a miracle fluke of destiny for it to even get that far in the first place), so are you going to stand up to the record company and be the reason that your bandmates don't get to own houses and drive decent automobiles? Which choice is even the one with the most integrity? They'll just bring in someone else to be the touring guitarists and you'll be a broke-***** never-was. "Hey, did I ever tell you I was the founding guitarist in Warrant? I quit because they wanted to have another guy play my parts in the studio and wanted me to just play the shows." You get one cocktail party anecdote out of the whole thing. Guitar heroism back in the 80's, especially in the metal genre, was very much part of the package that they were selling. So I agree that they were guilty of deception, of selling a counterfeit product. But I also can't be too hard on Joey Allen for playing along. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't and am not disagreeing with anything you said, not at all. I just find it a fascinating topic and am tossing things out there. It's interesting to consider that what's "fraudulent" or "deceptive" can be dependent on the musical genre and even in what region of the world the act is working in. The line not to be crossed is in different places, depending. For anything with lead vocals, it seems like the minimum expectation is that the person advertised as doing the singing is actually the person doing it....except that with Boney M. it never was and nobody gave a crap. Because Eurodance is a genre with little integrity to violate in the first place? Here's another interesting approach: Prince, who was and is very highly respected as a singer, player, and producer, played most of the instruments on his albums, but back in the day, in the minds of the fans, thanks to the Purple Rain movie "Prince and the Revolution" was a real band, not just a touring band whose members were sometimes called in to the studio to add some overdubs.

Dang, missed it. I actually was interested in it, too. Can't have enough glitch plug-ins.

"Nosedive" is brilliant, although one where reality overtook speculative fiction.😄 And "one of the less dark?" Maybe by Black Mirror standards. I recommend "15 Million Merits" in part because it's only the second one and some people like to watch even anthology series in order. But it really is a favorite.

Easiest to be confident of when one has not been offered the choice.🤨 There are SO many highly-respected bands who have had players replaced by studio ringers/guests at one time or another, to varying degrees. Even bands much respected by other players. The Beach Boys (probably most famously, on some songs not a single Beach Boy played a note), The Beatles, The Byrds, Steely Dan....and the list of ones we don't know about is longer than the list of ones we do know about. What went wrong for Milli Vanilli was that they replaced the lead vocalists without giving credit (that's typically where the line is drawn, as in the case of film musicals), and were too successful and copped a Grammy. We always want to credit our guest musicians (except that most of the time we don't) and importantly, didn't even do the vocals live. Audiences expect that at least vocals will be live. Don't we? Pitch correction, comping, drum replacement, note editing, arpeggiators....these things all exist to make musicians seem more skilled than they actually are. I'm with the "athleticism" argument: if what's most exciting about your music is that it's hard to play, well, then you should be playing it as heard. I also agree with the genre specificity. When possible, obey the expectations of the genre. In the case of 80's metal shred guitar, that's a tough one. If memory serves, appreciation of and admiration for the players' technical prowess was an integral part of the music. So from that standpoint oh no! Fraud! Say it ain't so, Warrant! But I also remember that the music industry and the process of making records was different 40 years ago. The only path to getting your music out to a wide audience and making a decent living from it led straight through a big corporation that didn't care at all about things like musicianship and authenticity except to the extent that they were concepts that could sell records. And the contracts that artists had to sign to get these corporations to loan them enough money to record using the facilities and techniques of the day often (usually?) stated somewhere that the label had the last say in whatever producer the band would be working with, and that the band had to abide by that producer's decisions. It was, after all, the label's money that was allowing the record to happen at all. The penalty for defying them? They'd not release the record, and the project and the band itself would be effectively dead. In light of that, I kinda admire Joey Allen for fessin' up all these years later. He made the choice to finally be honest about the process and risk attracting comments like "that's some Milli Vanilli sh*t in my book." 😄 Maybe it was, but whom to blame? A record company trying to maximize their return on investment (which was their primary job) or a group of young musicians at the mercy of the record company? A record producer trying to please the people who were paying his salary and also ensure that he would get hired for future projects? Warrant as an artistic concept and sellable product wouldn't have existed (or at least not been the same) without the participation of Joey Allen. Was hiring another talented musician to cover some of his tasks during the production of a record such a terrible thing? Maybe it was by the expectations of the genre. Replacing Dennis Wilson on drums is different from replacing a metal guitarist who the fans idolize as an awesome player. What of the Warrant fans over the years? Is the enjoyment they got from having it be the soundtrack of their lives now tainted? The kids paid to hear badass guitarists tear it UP, and I'll presume that Mike Slamer is indeed a badass guitarist who did indeed tear it up. He wasn't the badass guitarist they had been led to believe was tearing it up, but yet, up it was torn. Heads were banged, beers were consumed, babes were impressed, high school was endured. The product fulfilled its purpose. It's a fascinating question, and one of the topics that Adam touched on was the matter of jazz musicians working out parts ahead of time. I was in a club 30 years ago watching a jazz ensemble with another alt roc guitarist friend who had done some time at jazz camp. Of course the band traded fours (or in their case maybe eights) and when it came around to the guitarist, well, what she played was not very interesting. I don't mind simple, but this was just boring. Of course being guitar players we had to talk about this and I wondered why she apparently hadn't sat down with a recording and sketched out some ideas ahead of time. My own leads in those days were a mixture of ideas worked out ahead of time and in-the-moment improvisation. I would stock up on phrases for each song, and mostly stick to them, but if lightning struck, I'd run with it. He shook his head and said that the idea with jazz is that you're supposed to be such a hot player that you make up every solo right on the spot, otherwise it's cheating or something. I guess the idea is that you're supposed to be in the moment and reacting to what's around you and playing only what you feeeeeel, man. Which seems to imply that if you have a night where it's just not clicking, the audience is going to suffer. And I don't like making people who've shown up to watch me play suffer, unless that's part of the genre I'm working in (not entirely joking here). And why are ideas that you've worked out in private less valid than ones you've come up with on the spot? It seems like some kind of weird snobbery. And as such, to me, inauthentic. Because why front that you don't care about entertaining the audience? If you really don't, why have you sacrificed so much in order to play in front of people? So in this case, what was most "authentic" in the case of jazz solos was poseurism to me.

Right? I recall it as more of an ordeal than an entertainment. An unfortunately very common story. I said 50%, but that's actually optimistic based on my hope that devoted fans of the show by now are guaranteed to warn their friends away from watching the first episode, at least until they've watched the second one and a few more, and even then, one's life will not be diminished at all by skipping it entirely. I'm a BIG fan of the show, and it took me some time to make it to the second episode because I thoroughly agree with you about the first one. I've watched the remaining episodes of the show multiple times but have never gone back to the first one. It's not just the obvious repulsive elements; I didn't find the storytelling, etc. to be very good. It's as if Brooker always wanted to write a TV script where the Prime Minister is forced to....in order to ensure the well-being of a member of the royal family, and then he didn't manage to build anything interesting around it. My experience was of thinking "why am I even sitting here watching this?" Because I didn't really care about the contrived crisis or any of the characters. The Prime Minister is neither bad enough that it feels like he has it coming nor noble enough that we care about his plight. I kind of wonder if it was somehow a deliberate move on Brooker's part to make sure that his show would always be a cult item. It's designed to alienate everyone who watches it from the start, and then they have to give it another try because someone begged them to. Or who knows, maybe the first episode was more relevant in the UK. Maybe there are references in it that viewers in other countries won't pick up on. Something about how low the government will degrade itself to protect the royals at all cost? I can vouch for the second episode, "15 Million Merits" as not merely being an improvement, but even approaching the "as good as TV gets" level. Good storytelling, humor (although very dark humor of course), a very relatable, likeable protagonist....as I said, a career-making role for Daniel Kaluuya (Jordan Peele hired him to star in Get Out based on his performance as Bing). It's representative of what Black Mirror does well when it does it well, which is give us a look at where current social and technical trends might take us if we're not careful. It has things to say about class, employment, entertainment....speculative fiction at its best. The show of course doesn't always maintain that quality level; even The Twilight Zone had its clinkers. I found the most recent season to be of generally lower quality than previous ones, although the first episode should be required watching for software company executives to educate them as to why a significant number of users will NEVER be comfortable with the software licensing model that must not be named. I also liked the one with Paul Giamatti for multiple reasons. There's one with Peter Capaldi that is delightful due to the trip down memory lane of technology from the past 30 years. Brooker must have had a blast with that one. The one with the return of the U.S.S Callister had no reason to exist, IMO.

The Buggles: The Age of Plastic. Flash and the Pan.

The best way to understand it, IMO, is to just try it. For the most part, it only applies to multi-mic'd sources like drum overheads or stereo mic'd acoustic guitar. So if you record such things, next time you do (or perhaps you already have a project that includes a track or two with something multi-mic'd), try either demo'ing one of the popular plug-ins or doing it manually by lining the waveforms up by eye. Zoom in all the way on the waveforms and you should be able to see if there's any misalignment. If there is, nudge one of them so that they line up. If you hear a difference, then you'll know. If you don't hear a difference, then you're doing a really good job of placing your mics! I find that it has the most effect on multi-mic'd sources where I want to pan the resulting tracks a bit, like with stereo acoustic guitar. I use MAutoAlign, and it can make a big difference in the perceived size of the instrument. The 10' guitar effect. This goes for not just left/right, but the perception in other dimensions. I have (pardon the pun) mixed feelings about MAutoAlign. I usually like what it does, but I'm not so confident that it's doing what it says it does, aligning the sources. This is because it's possible to run MAutoAlign's analysis multiple times on the same source and get different results. I mean, if it were working properly, wouldn't the results be the same, or at least very similar, each time I run it? Whatever, I don't trip on it, if it sounds good it IS good and MAutoAlign is either lining up my tracks so well that they bloom, or it's inducing a nice little Haas effect. 😄 I have Neutron, but since I haven't been recording acoustic guitars or drum overheads in quite some time, I haven't been able to compare its results with MAutoAlign's. It is true that back in the analog days, they didn't have fancy high tech ways of getting phase alignment correct. It was managed by rolling a bit of tape, listening back to the results, and then adjusting the mic placement if anything sounded weird. As with so many things, this was more labor intensive than how its done now. Studios were more likely to have multiple engineers so that one could control the tape machine while the other would move the mics. Also, the engineers were more experienced and practiced. The explosion of home studios and recording as a hobby means that the "chief engineer" might go for months at a time without setting up a multi-mic recording. So a purist might suggest that doing it the labor intensive way is the "best," and perhaps it theoretically is, but as I said, if it sounds good it IS good and who cares how you get there. If you like how your recordings sound, there's a solid chance that they ain't broke. I think it's something to be aware of, but not trip too hard about. Of course asking computer recordists not to trip about something is a big ask. Me included.

Ha! When I saw the topic title I thought "Charlie Brooker." I discovered Screenwipe and his other shows several months ago after falling in love with the Philomena Cunk shows on Netflix. For anyone who likes that sort of thing, his shows are all available on YouTube. Brooker is the evil genius behind Black Mirror. An excellent show that while it has done well, would have taken over the world had it not been for its unfortunate first episode, which probably cut its potential audience by about 50% due to people watching it and deciding that the show was not for them. If the show had started with the second episode, the amazing "Fifteen Million Merits," Black Mirror might have its own movie, theme park, and game franchise by now. That episode pretty much made Daniel Kaluuya's career happen (and rightly so, he's unforgettable in it). So when I recommend the show to people, I beg them not to watch the first episode, at least not until they've watched the second one. It's an anthology show, so it doesn't much matter what order you watch them in. As long as you skip the first one. This season's first episode is an incisive commentary on a subject much discussed in our forum here. Given that Brooker started out writing reviews of video games, it's not surprising that he'd have something to say about a current trend in the software industry.

I hoped that with Sonar we might see some progress with this, but it seems to have fallen to the "death to all personalization" edict.

I'm sure this feature has been requested before. When creating new tracks and folders, they appear as already named, you must double click in their name field to edit the name. I would like to have the option to have new tracks and folders appear with their names already selected and ready to edit, as if I had already double-clicked in the field. This would make the creation of new folders and tracks go faster. Secondary request: the option to leave the "output" part out of the names of newly created synth tracks. This applies to synth tracks such as created by selecting "First Synth Audio Output" in the Insert Soft Synth Options dialog. For whatever reason, simple instrument tracks already use only the name of the synth and the instance number. Example: I add a synth track for Xpand!2. The name given to the track is "Xpand!2 1 Primary Output." While this is handy information when creating tracks for synths with multiple outputs, in the scenario where I only use the first output (which is the vast majority of my synths), the "Primary Output" is just clutter. It displays as "Xpand!2 1 Prima" on Console strips. If I create a simple instrument track for Xpand!2, the track is created with the name "Xpand!2 1" No "Primary Output" to have to delete. So for those of us who create our synth tracks using the "First Synth Audio Output" option, please allow us to use the track name that Sonar would use if it were a simple instrument track being created. Yes, I know that all I have to do is double click on the track name and delete the extra text, but for a project with say, 15 soft synths, it's a boring, repetitive task that slows the flow.

John didn't post for months. I, too, am happy that he's back.

The Sansui 1975 styling of the UI's is lovely.

I must do a comparative test between MMatcher and HorNET VHS and ToneBoosters TB Morphit to see which works the best for headphone correction. Theoretically, my K240's, DT880's, ATH-M50's, MDR 7506's, and Superlux 681 EVO's should all sound the same using these products, which should also sound the same as each other. Somehow I expect that such is not the case.😄

Oh, I thought that what you meant by "trying to take a leaf out of Plugin Alliance's book with their freebies" was that they were emulating the practice of giving away a number of plug-ins in order to draw attention to the ones that they charge for. Which is a practice that I've benefited greatly from over the years and which has encouraged me to buy the companies' paid products. Plugin Alliance, MeldaProduction, IK Multimedia, Applied Acoustics and iZotope all have hundreds of dollars of licensing fees I've paid after being given a free taste. It predisposes me to look favorably on their products in part because it suggests to me that the people running things at these companies might understand the importance of good will in successful marketing, that it's not so much about wringing the last drop of money out of each individual product, that the warm fuzzies will result in more than enough sales to offset the costs of producing these freebies. So it's a smart thing for Waves to try to get into. Given their reputation, even among people who like their products, for trying to extract as much cash out of each user as they can with WUP or full-on subscription licensing. It seems with Waves that plenty of people love the products, but few people feel any good will at all toward the company producing them. They have had the practice for many years of giving away licenses around Black Friday, but that seems not to have done much to inspire good feelings.

I've watched enough White Sea Studios YT reviews to look for the non-functional screw heads😄. Rackmount holes I can forgive, after all it is T-RackS. Moreover, as they are at the edges, they don't distract the eye.

I'm going to proceed with using it as if there are no restrictions. I've searched for a licensing agreement and none is disclosed in the usual places.

Kilohearts, Native Instruments, iZotope, ToneBoosters, MeldaProduction, Audio Damage, Cherry Audio and IK Multimedia are just some of the companies whose product lines have included multiple free loss leaders for years. Not having a collection of free products is the exception for plug-in manufacturers. I'm having a hard time trying to think of a company that doesn't. Which is the point, I reckon. FabFilter, Sonible, UAD....

The licenses for the individual modules are specific to TR5 or TR6, so if your licenses were purchased for TR5, you aren't entitled to the TR6 versions. That's how it's worked for me at least. I would think that that is by design, because it would amount to a free upgrade for each of the modules, which I don't think they'd want to do (otherwise why bother making new versions).