Starship Krupa

It's a really easy mod, all you need is a pair of flush cutters. You clip out 6 small diodes. There are optional steps I take for tidiness sake, I don't like having unused parts just sitting on the PCB, but just taking out those diodes will do the job. If you can read component reference designators on a PCB to identify the components, you can do this. The two sides of the RA-100 are on different PCB's, so you can try it first on one channel for comparison (which is what I did). For me, the difference wasn't even subtle. It was like the difference between a FLAC and a 64K MP3. My handle on that board is "Euthymia." The RA-100 is designed for easy servicing (another reason that I worked so hard and long to try to get mine to sound good). You're the second person on the forum to request the mod info, so I'm going to start putting a link to it in my sig. I invite consultation on any aspect of the process. I'm a pro audio repair and design person with many years of experience. Once you clip out that protection circuit, it should be a great monitor amp to go with the Point Sevens. I prefer self-powered subwoofers myself. As John said, you can run your sub from a different output on the MOTU. You could even do the crossover in software, using EQ plug-ins in Cakewalk's Console.

I have a variety of vintage amplifiers, each of them was designed for pro studio use. An 80's Symetrix, a couple of 70's Crowns, and an early 90's Alesis. In their respective stock states, the definition and stereo image of the Symetrix and the Crowns was way, way better than the Alesis, which made no sense to me as a designer and repairer of audio hardware myself. I looked at the schematic and spec sheet and it was a clean design and I could see no reason in the audio signal path why there would be such a great difference. So I went in search of answers myself with my theory books, and inquired among colleagues. One of them identified a possible culprit in the form of overcomplicated output short protection circuitry, which I then removed as an experiment. This brought the Alesis into the same sonic league as the others. I hadn't considered it because my understanding of solid state audio amplifiers extends only as far as the elements that actually do the amplifying. I don't know from protection circuits, especially poorly-designed ones. Now at least I know that if it looks like the protection circuit is too complex and embedded in the audio amplifying parts....be suspicious. I tell this story not to brag about what cool amplifier modificationers my friends and I are, but rather to illustrate that not all amplifiers sound the same, even ones with a frequency response that extends many Hz on either side of the abilities of human hearing. There are things that make for good detail and imaging like phase coherence, slew rate, and minimum group delay. The Alesis RA-100 has gotten a poor reputation in the 30 years since it was introduced, which is both well-deserved and unfortunate. If the designers (and I guarantee that there were multiple cooks spoiling that soup) hadn't been so nervous-nellie about output short protection, perhaps had just copied the (comparatively simple) protection circuitry from someone like Crown, it would have gone down in history as an incredibly great sounding amp for its price point. A positive side effect of their poor rep is that I can get them for under $50, and they're great workhorse amps, once modded. Using a home stereo receiver is not a great solution, for exactly the reason you've noticed: receivers are designed to sound good, not necessarily accurate. What we want for mix engineering tools are things that are as accurate as possible so that our efforts can provide as much of the good as possible. If I've got an amplification system that itself is trying too hard to make my music sound good, I probably won't do as good a job making it sound good myself. You didn't ask for advice, but I'll suggest you get a power amp that's purpose-designed and built for professional audio use. Read the spec sheet, it will tell you whether it's flat or not. I like second-hand gear because it's cheap and I know how to bench test it and fix it myself. It doesn't have to be expensive, but one from a reputable brand name is preferred. Crown, Carver, Mackie. You don't need anything over 100W unless you seek to deafen yourself and/or destroy your Point Sevens. To drive a pair of Point Sevens, you don't need much wattage at all. One of my best (which is to say accurate) sounding monitor amps is my 20W per channel Symetrix A40. It can drive my Event 20/20 passives, Boston A70's or Alesis Monitor Ones to chest-thumping, discomfort-inducing levels. The number "20W" looks laughably low on paper in these days of "500W" home theater receivers, but it's a professional amplifier with professional specs, and when they say 20W, they mean that you could drive a pair 20W lightbulbs with it 24/7 until we're all long since dust and it would stay happily within its distortion and frequency response specs. While mounted in a rack, with no ventilation. I'll refrain from offering advice on aspects of your mixing environment about which I have no information. I will say that books are very good absorbers of sound, and bookcases can actually make pretty good bass traps. I myself use Alesis Point Sevens (with a subwoofer, and I even use those little plastic "cane tip" things they supplied to plug the reflex ports) as my main computer speakers and secondary reference system and I think they sound really good. I spend many hours a day with them, I listen to them more than my main monitors. I wouldn't be as confident doing complete, finished mixes on nothing but those due to the higher bass rolloff (assuming no sub), but they're perfectly good speakers, ones I can listen to for long periods of time. Mine have a pleasantly extended top end compared to my other monitors, so if something is icepicking, I catch it better when I flip over to the Point Sevens. Their big brothers, the Alesis Monitor Ones, were designed to be sold in a set with the RA-100 amplifier. I've heard from multiple mix engineers who were around the scene in the 90's, and the poor Monitor Ones got an (IMO, undeserved) reputation for sounding bad, which I now know is more the fault of the amp they were originally paired with. Too bad, I also have a set of Monitor Ones and also like their sound. The RA-100 itself sounds amazing now that I've pulled the idiot-proofing circuitry out. My output short "protection" consists of not letting my speaker leads touch each other, especially not when the volume's up. Simple, but effective.

Another that I can think of is that most of the (wonderful, actually) freebies that NI already do give out seem designed to whet the user's appetite for paid products. An NI freebie of that magnitude should lead them to want to buy the full version of Kontakt, Reaktor synths, Guitar Rig models, etc. What's the upgrade path from a no-longer-developed synth? I think the deal with the lack of work on the fancy Cakewalk plug-ins (such as synths and LP EQ's) is that the only people I've seen on the forum or elsewhere who are interested are people who already use Cakewalk (or did until 5 years ago).

Thanks for sharing what worked for you. There seem to be a number of us trying to get our NanoKONTROL2's working with Cakewalk. I've managed to get mine to control some plug-in parameters, trigger Matrix cells using the track control buttons, etc. It's fussy, to be sure.

I will vouch for this being a ferocious tool for creating glitch percussion rhythms and breakdowns. If you are having a hard time with "phrase generator," I mostly use it as a drum machine. One drawback is that the samples you load into it can only be triggered by its own internal sequencer. You can't send it MIDI notes to just trigger the samples. Being a Glitchmachine, of course you can automate and control a huge number of its parameters, but no sample triggering. I guess they wanted to stick with the stochastic nature of the instrument. I need to send them a feature request about that....

There are multiple plug-in houses that have recently put discontinued products up for free download and use. Audio Damage, Tone Boosters....

Yes. More and faster. According to the people who make the video editing software, the more RAM you have on your graphics card the better. You can do 4K with a card that has 2G but the recommendation for 4K is 4G or more. An operation where those CUDA cores shine with video work is when you go to render. nVidia's higher-end cards have an onboard hardware CODEC for this kind of rendering. As with all things like this, it depends on the makers of the video editing software to take advantage of this. nVidia promote it via their NVENC developers' kit. For strictly DAW use, when I used the onboard graphics of my i7-3770, things in the Multidock would take just a little bit longer to Initially appear if I had it on monitor 2. When I was able to switch back to a card with 2G of GDDR, that went away. I experience smoother playback of full screen video on monitor 2 with the more capable cards, and I imagine that if I were using a DAW to do scoring, that would also be true. Having said all this, for video and DAW use, I don't know that there would be a noticeable difference between the latest GTX 3060 and a previous generation high end card. But if you are building a cost-no-object future-resistant rocket sled, why not go with the absolute top model and not even have to think about whether a single Windows program will run on your system, regardless of "system requirements?"

I tried a GT 720 and it was....not great compared to my old GTX550Ti. nVidia got kinda sleazy about their product naming for awhile. There was actually a version of the GT 1030 that uses DDR4 that is absolute poop. Same name, same price, hard to claim that it was anything other than an attempt to mislead consumers. Shameful. Having worked in multiple corporations, I suspect that the ploy worked in thousands of cases. IT department submits a purchase order for a dozen GT 1030's to upgrade the set of Dell towers they're buying for the design department, purchasing department finds the lowest possible price....which turns out to be a wretched dumpster of a card. The design department never notices because their new systems are at least faster than the old ones, and they blame AutoCAD for any sluggishness. As long as nobody stays late to play games on their work computer, they'll never know the difference. Some twerp at nVidia probably looked at the results of some research that indicated that most of the video cards that they were selling to Fortune 500 companies weren't getting anywhere close to their actual performance limits. Opportunity: sell them a "premium" card at the same price that they'll never notice is a slug. Give it the same name. I suspect that the whole GT 710/720 thing came from a similar place: hey, what a deal on a "700 series" graphics card. Except that it's not until you get to the GTX 750 Ti that you have a 7xx with the expected performance. If their products didn't work so well in the array of applications I use, this sleazery might be enough for me to look elsewhere. But they do work well, and they at least pay lip service to excelling for applications other than gaming. Plus, I like the way their drivers make things look with Direct X (no, the AMD drivers don't look exactly the same). I found the performance with Cakewalk (and Vegas) to be noticeable between the GT 720 and the GTX550Ti, but not so much between the GTX550Ti and the GT 1030, which may confirm my suspicion that what really matters most in those applications is how much and how fast the GDDR5 memory goes. Despite being old, the GTX550Ti has 2G of DDR5, and I think that makes it so it still hauls at 2-D tasks. The GT 1030 eats its lunch at gaming because newer, faster processor.

As part of my quest to build a quiet PC (that will still allow me to do 3-D adventure gaming and NLE work), I recently got a passively-cooled nVidia GT1030. Couldn't be happier. It even runs the GPUAudio FIR convolver. Only draws 30W at full tilt. It runs any of my games (MYST Online Uru, Event(0), Manifold Garden, Obduction, etc.) in highest quality, and works a treat for 2-monitor stuff. The GTX 550Ti it replaced ran its fan constantly, even when not using the 3-D engine. If the only thing I were doing with my system were DAW work, anything with 2G DDR5 would be fine. For that alone, there's no performance difference between the 550Ti and the 1030. I didn't try it with the i7-6770's onboard video.

I've encountered multiple objects that go black when I make them transparent.

A month and a half in, The Sword That Was Reforged is cruising right along. I got a good enough deal on a passively cooled nVidia GT 1030, and I'm pleased to say that it will run all of my (not cutting edge) games at ultra quality. As a bonus, the GPUAudio Fir Convolver is compatible with it. Not wanting a political discussion on GPUAudio, but I think it has promise for computation-intensive tasks like convolution. Anything else....I dunno. Maybe physical modeling. It appeals to my frugal nature; having all of that power just sitting there picking its nose seems wasteful, and the engine isn't doing that much with DAW work. The biggest generator of fan noise is now the power supply, an EVGA White 500W. It was touted as having a quiet temp-controlled fan, so I dunno what's up with that. It's 10 bucks to throw a Noctua or Be Quiet in it, but I'm kinda wondering what's up with the stock fan and whether an aftermarket one would even help. Silence is addictive; as I get things quieter in here, it's tempting to go further. One of the oddest annoyances is with spellcheck. I participate in multiple online forums, and use company names and tech terms a lot. The Sword's spellchecker dictionary doesn't have the terms entered into it that I had spent years entering. I had no idea that I had such an extensive personal dictionary....

Old post, I know, but if you haven't enabled hyperthreading in your system BIOS, that will help a bunch. As an experiment, I tried the same project on my aging laptop with and without hyperthreading enabled, and it played fine with and ground to a halt without. Good on ya for rockin' that vintage system! I'm all about squeezing the last bit of use out of whatever computer I own. And ever since Sandy Bridge, that's been very possible (I even just built a DAW for a friend around an old Core 2 Quad, and he loves it). Before you start overclocking, at minimum, get an air duster can and blow the dust off of your CPU cooler. I would also re-do the paste on the CPU cooler. After 11 years, it might not be working as well as it once did. If your case has room for another fan, those are good to have as well. Silent ones are under $10 on Amazon Prime. I've had good experiences with Be Quiet and Noctua. I like HWINFO for monitoring temperatures and fans. You can watch what's going on with rising temperatures, see if your system is going into thermal throttling under load, etc. It helped me get my antique Dell Latitude laptop running way better. You don't say what graphics you are using, but despite what some say, I have found that a more powerful (doesn't have to be a rocket sled, just an nVidia that supports OpenGL) card does help with Cakewalk. Especially if you run 2 monitors, the mixer on monitor 2 draws faster if you have more and faster video memory. Some plug-in manufacturers (Newfangled, Meldaproduction) make use of OpenGL in their GUI's, which takes some load off the CPU. I just installed a used passively-cooled nVidia GT 1030 and am happy with it, even for gaming.

Fortunately that leaves you with many good options at good prices. The extra buttons took a lot of getting used to. Even with just the differences between the Marathon and the Anywhere, I'm still getting used to it. The switch for unlocking the freewheel on the Marathon is in the same place as the "middle button" on the Anywhere, and to unlock the wheel on the Anywhere, you press the wheel itself. The wheel IS the middle button on the Marathon. I'm still getting used to this function swap. Also, the side buttons are kinda stiff, they take more pressure to activate, and holding both down for Ctrl-Alt is a little trickier. They are in a good location to avoid accidental activation, and yes, @Kevin Perry, they are set back just above where my thumb naturally sits. Really, there's not much substitute for going down to Office Max and trying the display mice. They all have subtle differences. I took a chance with the Anywhere 2 because I trust Logitech. Fortunately, it worked. If you can get a programmable mouse with the extra buttons in the right place for you, it is really good for Cakewalk with all its key modifiers. Heck, I'd like to have another button I could program to Shift. Also, can't say enough good about programming the middle button to double-click. It helps so much when browsing presets on plug-ins that require a double-click for that.

Please post what make, model, and year of car. Electric, hybrid, ICE? Are you using regular or premium unleaded? With ethanol? Are you in California? We can't help you unless we know the specs.

If you're recording audio, yes, absolutely. Onboard hardware CODEC's and associated hardware have come a long way as far as playback, but not so much as far as recording. Interfaces make no difference whatsoever in the rendered audio that Cakewalk produces, it's only in the quality of recording and playback on your system. That said, the better monitoring you can do, obviously, the better you can mix. But there are many EDM artists who use nothing but the onboard chip for playback on their laptops. Get a Presonus Audiobox or Studio 2|4 and a pair of Kalis, and guaranteed, you'll find mixing to be a more pleasant experience.

Yes, it's not a problem in general with Cakewalk. Cakewalk needs to be given, in Preferences/File/VST Settings, the correct location of the folder(s) where you have installed your 3rd-party (non Cakewalk) plug-ins. I install my VST2 plug-ins tin C:\VST64 and use the default C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\ directory for VST3's.

I've found some great pads and happening basses among the presets. As far as learning how to craft my own sounds, I can get about as far as turning off the internal reverb (which is important to me). When I've watched people do tutorials, it looks like they're scribbling in the little blue window or something? I couldn't figure it out. I have so many synths that I can always find a sound that fits in the factory presets of one or the other of them. When I dig more deeply, it's not into something as idiosyncratic as Iris 2 Just like Chromophone and bx_oberhausen and other CPU-hungry synths, if you cut the # of voices down, things get a lot better, and I usually can't hear a difference. I don't play 2-handed chords with lush pads anyway. Those pads have some looooooong release tails.

I've only ever felt the need to have Elements, and I came close to spending whatever pittance it was to upgrade to the RX9 Elements license back when they announced that 10 would be coming out. Am I glad that I held off on that. RX10 Elements eliminates the standalone audio editor, which I happen to like. ?

I tried to use the "@" to tag you but it didn't work.

I wonder if it's had a financial impact on the music software industry.

Are you waiting for the behavior to change back to the way you preferred it? The longer you wait, the more changed and new features you'll need to learn if you want to stay proficient. Also, if you stick around and keep an eye on the forum, you can raise a voice of dissent to changes you don't like. These changes happen because a lot of people chime in with things like "I accidentally held Control when I meant to hold Shift when I moved the fader and now my entire mix is off." Despite pleas from myself and others, fader moves are still not Undo-able changes. So I like it the way it behaves now. Put in a feature request to make the old behavior available via editing an .INI file or whatever.

Late reply, I understand, but maybe you recorded with loop turned on? Open the take lanes on the track and see if maybe there are extra clips

One of my favorites, it's definitely in the "with a twist" category, is ATMOS2. Scroll down. It's free, too. Ambient drone for days.

The gameplay in Manifold Garden is not MYST-like. It's kind of the ultimate platform game, but instead of jumping, you switch the direction of gravity and fall. While you're falling, you can use the nav keys to direct yourself to another platform, etc.