Shane_B.

Thanks. I'll check them out. They have a free no strings attached, no credit card required 30 day free trial. I use Windows and the free Malware Bytes but have been trying to decide on a good paid one. I can find good and bad reviews for all of them when I search but if you trust ESET then I'll definitely check them out. I've been tinkering with modding Fallout since I got that new video card recently. I had to install some .net versions that weren't on my system. Ever since then my internet connection has been garbage. I don't know if it was the .net stuff or perhaps something else from one of the mods. They are all checked by the Nexusmods host site and verified virus free but still ... you never know. I know hate is a strong word these days, but I absolutely mamma pajama blanking HATE dealing with .net versions and updates. Never, not once, have I ever messed with them (Looking at you Sonar) and had a good outcome. My system was screaming fast until I messed with that. Now it's totally blanked with a capital *. But I had to install a few different versions in order for the game to even load. It's been downhill since then and I am not a happy camper about it.

Studio One is great about cleaning up all that stuff. Speaking of Studio One, if you never check, all the updates that are downloaded are saved. Check the downloads folder for Window's. I never used to but recently I've been checking it regularly. I found several GB worth of old install files there from various sources including Presonus. When I update Studio One the install files automatically get saved in my windows download folder. Don't know if that's the norm for everyone or some setting I changed on my system, but they never get deleted automatically on my system and I never manually download them. I always do the update through S1.

Business exploits and personal PC exploits are two very different things. I don't think anyone is downplaying any of it but the reality is it's extremely rare to get a virus on your PC now days between everything being analyzed by the site providers and especially Window's built in protection plus all the free and/or inexpensive antivirus software out there. IRT business, is the security really up to the people who rent the website space or the people who own the actual server they use? I thought most companies, if not all, are using Cloud services and the security is the hosts responsibility.

I can count on 1 hand the amount of times I've actually had a virus infect my system. I can honestly only remember 2 times specifically. Both came from the same source before I realized what had happened. It was a mouse driver floppy and I still remember the virus. Die Hard. It manifested slowly and eventually all you saw were 2 purple letters come streaming from the center of your screen "DH" and it would turn black. The more you rebooted the worse it became until eventually it's all that would happen. It came on the floppy for the mouse driver on a brand new system I ordered. When I contacted them they said the system the mouse manufacturer made the floppies from got infected and it had nothing to do with them but the only fix was to swap out the HDD so they overnighted me a new HDD and different mouse at no charge. I never knew you could use VLC to convert file types. I need to dig in to it more I guess. I tried to use it for streaming and could never get it to work and I used it to check files I ripped from my own blu ray's and converted. Window's gets all pissy about those file types so I just throw them on a thumb drive now and pop in my TV and they play great. No disc player needed. I used to use a free program called Format Factory to convert files but Windows started scanning it and marked it as a security threat so I stopped using it. And when you pull up their website now it says it's unsecured. So I don't know what happened with them. It was a really nice program but I've been afraid to use it since that started happening. If I want to shrink a jpg now for the forums I just use the built in MS paint program. Gimp is actually pretty difficult to use for such a quick simple thing.

I was getting shots between my vertebra for a while but it didn't help. The doctors tell me I'll eventually be in a wheelchair either from that problem or the bus that ran a stop sign and hit me. I just learn to deal with it. Drinking helps, but I hate to sit around like that all the time so I stopped having my 2 beer a night. That and the wife was getting really really mad about it and I get it. It's why I'm so cheery and happy and lighthearted and friendly all the time. ? That said, I'm a firm believer in you have to keep moving. Been hitting the gym hard the last two weeks. I went for an MRI 3 weeks ago and he pretty much said you can't make it worse and the more you move the longer you'll be able to keep going. That said, I don't mind lifting heavy stuff. Never really did. My love for the music and being with my friends and playing for people made it all worthwhile. I used to put those SP5's on telescoping poles. We had them up about 7 feet. I was the tallest so I always had to lift each one over my head and line up the 3" holes on the bottom with the pole. I didn't really mind it all though. But it is true my one shoulder is lower than the other. Every new doctor I go to points it out and I give him the story. Honestly, I don't know if that's what it's from or not but I've been that way a very long time. On a side note ... I'm going back home in a couple months. I have a gig and 2 band practices lined up with guys I haven't seen since the late 80's. I am SO EXCITED. I keep trying to remind myself why I'm still here . . . oh yeah that's right. N/M. Edit: I'm driving out and have to take my amp and 2 guitars with me plus the rest of my travel stuff. I'm going to be there 3 weeks then my wife is flying out and we're taking a week to drive back home through the south.

If you have an older version of VLC installed you can check for updates and download the latest version and it should get it from a secure server. It even has a checksum function to make sure you got a clean one. People do a quick search and get it from any source but you should always get the free opensource stuff from the developer working on it if you can. You should with anything you download but it's particularly easy for hackers to infect the opensource stuff. The only other site I trust is Sourceforge.net and I don't even trust them if I can help it. If I find something there I want I always try to search for the developers direct site and download it there or go to where they say it's safe to download. Sometimes they send you back to Sourceforge and sometimes they don't ... The only free stuff I use is Gimp, Blender, Open Office, and VLC and they all have their own sites. I didn't even realize they were still updating VLC. I thought it died many years ago along with Winamp. Speaking of, they are bringing Winamp back sometime soon. I liked how you could customize it like Reaper. I had a skin for it that was all analog meters but eventually had to stop using it as Window's advanced and Winamp died. You can still get the last official version that came out years ago but on new high res monitors it's almost impossible for me to see. I used to make my own skins for it but I deleted all that stuff a long time ago when it died off. Now I'm tempted to try out the latest version of VLC. I keep reading that it does a lot of things I've been wanting to do but the version I have is very old. This is VLC's official site. I haven't been able to find one that you didn't have to pay a lot of money for. The old version of Windows Media Player is still on your system, assuming you are running Windows 11. You just have to dig for it. I like it better than the new media player, but I dislike them both. I always used Winamp and VLC. But like I said above, I thought VLC died out a long time ago with Winamp but I'm wrong. You can also upload the VLC install file to several free virus checking sites and they'll scan it too. I use this site and this site.

Pfft. Crybabies. I hauled all this plus stood for 4 hours with an 83 Gibson Les Paul Custom Deluxe or a Japanese (very heavy/well made) Strat hung on my neck. My one shoulder still droops a good inch or two lower than the other from having a guitar hanging on me every Fri./Sat. night for 16 years straight. PLUS I was the keyboard player on some songs for a while too. The drummer got off easy IMHO. These are similar but not the exact ones. (All other pics are the exact models I used to haul. Two of these .... This was so heavy it had wheels ... It's a 2x12 combo with enormous transformers. It was a good 80lbs or more. Plus 2 guitars, plus my rack unit, and mic stand, and all the other smalls that go with all that like cables, mic, strings, picks, etc. etc.. Never had a problem with rear wheel drive in my 81 Monte' Carlo driving in the winter hauling all that crap. It was actually worse in my front wheel drive van.

The first time I heard the word detritus I had to look it up. Weird Paul used it in his song Maybe You'll Find Some In The Garbage. @Bapu Great song. I don't hear a thing I would change. I didn't realize until just now that Citizen Regen was you. Glad you posted it in the CH. It's pretty rare I get to these parts anymore. I see it's been really active here lately though and that's good to see!!

@Tim Smith My first was an EMU-0404. It was a great card. It really hurt to let that one go but I recycled it along with a dead Sony DAT, Sony PS3 Fatboy, and a dead ART rack effects unit. It was the first one they made. The Mach II iirc? I tried to send it to them to get it repaired but they said they didn't do board level repairs and they didn't have any more boards laying around for it. I still have the box for the EMU somewhere I think.

I still have my Fast Track Ultra. That was a great audio interface. Shockingly low latency. The rubbery knobs on it have turned to a tacky goo now but otherwise it's like new. I still have it in the original box with all the original paperwork. I think there's a big blue M-Audio sticker in the box too that came with it. The only reason I stopped using it was they refused to write a 64bit driver when XP reached the end of it's life and we had to upgrade Windows. I lost faith in them when they refused to release a driver for it and I stopped using their gear then. The vast majority of my music was done through this. I didn't switch over to new hardware until, well, my Amazon order history tells me March 8, 2016. That's when I got my Presonus Firewire Studio. But I've only done a handful of recordings since then. I'm kind of winding down on the whole recording thing. I never thought in my life I would ever say that. But, I replaced the Firewire with the Studio 1810c in January because I thought the Firewire died but it turned out it wasn't the problem. By the time I figured out it was still ok it was too late to return the Studio 1810c. But, that 1810c is an incredible unit. I absolutely love it. It has some quirks to setting it up but once I got it figured out it works flawlessly, when I do use it.

I had a tiny C: drive I loaded it on but I had everything else loaded on SD cards. Samples I used, all my tracks I recorded and edited, even my free VST's I had on there. I could record right to the SD cards using Studio One and it never let me down once. The most I ever recorded was an entire side of a 45 minute 8 track master cassette at 96/24 at 4 tracks at a time. I had to record 4 at a time because the machine only has 4 outputs. What I did was, I transferred the drum track plus 3 other tracks at one time. Then I recorded the drum track again and however many tracks I had left. In Studio One you can quantize audio tracks so what I did was I set a group for the first set of 4 tracks that included the drums then the second set which included the drums again and however many tracks were left. I then designated the drum track as the quantize track and set it to line the drum track from the two groups and it would put everything in perfect timing. Cassette based multitrack machines back then had no time code and they drifted if you transferred tracks one at a time. Studio One made that task of lining them up a breeze once I figured out the process. But as for recording more than 4 at a time, I've never done that. But I have transferred extremely large high bitrate and high sample rate 4 tracks sessions and have never had a problem. I don't think the DAW itself has a whole heck of a lot to do with that anyway. I think the real story is how it handles manipulating those files once they are captured. Recording waves is all on the audio card drivers and how your hardware is set up if I'm not mistaken.

The fox sentence is what all the typewriter repairmen used to test them way back when we still worked on them. Those IBM Selectric's were mechanical wonders.

I'd take them to a Goodwill type store before I threw them out. The larger stores will have contacts where they can recycle electronics and make sure it doesn't go in a land fill. I've seen old Bose speakers and all kinds of stuff at places like that.

The old Studio One forum was great. Then they started having members of the forum become admin and ever since then it became a ghost town. They drove everyone off. But it did use to be as good a forum as the old Sonar forum. They even had a 'Coffee House' type area that was just as active. Then they hid it and set it to where you could only view or participate if you logged in when they transitioned to their new forum. Then they set it to where the threads auto deleted after so many days. Then they removed the link on their main page to the forum. Now the OT section has been removed completely and their mega threads that kept going like Ed's and a few others here have been deleted. They pretty much kicked everyone out and wanted it business period. It's pretty rare that I go over there any more. Nothing is the same at all. Not even remotely close and I want no part of it. They can't even get their song forum right. They added the ability to embed SoundCloud links but crippled them so you can't post private songs from your SoundCloud page like you can here. It's like they took every step they could possibly think of to make the forum as miserable as they possibly could to drive people away. It's really weird. There is a lot of bloatware in Sphere. I signed up for a while but I ended up not using 99% of it. In my case it was actually cheaper just to pay for the upgrades. Then again, if you bought outright the stuff you did use, over time, it would be cheaper to just buy it outright. If you use every single thing they ever release all the time, then yeah, I guess Sphere would be a good deal, but who does that? And of course we're talking about home users. Pro studio's don't actually pay for any of it so signing up for Sphere makes sense to have all those samples and loops at your disposal. I cancelled Sphere and I more than likely won't upgrade to version 6. I skipped from 3 to 5 and it was fine. I've been using Studio One over 10 years now and I can honestly say I can't remember a single crash that was caused by Studio One. I was running it off digital camera SD cards for a while because I had 2 HDD's die on me and not once did I have a problem doing that. I still have the SD cards with the songs on them that I recorded. Probably should transfer those before they die. True story, I even washed them when I forgot them in my shirt pocket one time. I freaked out. Popped them in to the reader after they came out of the dryer and they still worked. I know I have had a few VST's hiccup a few times, but I could probably count on 1 hand the amount of times that has happened. S1 certainly is worth every penny of whatever anyone is willing to pay for it, that's for sure.

Well it's sure working. All of your mixes sound really good. The last 4 that I've done I did completely on my old MK series AKG's. They're not in front of me now and I can't remember the model. MK-II 240's maybe? It took a couple trips to my truck but with the help of O9A I was able to get the best mixes I've ever done and in record time for me just using cans. Do you remember bentech from the old forum? IIRC he said he mainly used meters when mixing and mastering and I always thought mix wise his songs were really good.

That particular pair for sale has a history of being in a famous studio. The other ones for sale that I saw were going for about half that.

It's hard to let stuff go. I still have some stuff from the very early 80's myself. I have an extremely powerful Peavey phantom powered mic a friend gave me in the mid 80's and I even have the first recording I made when I was 12 ~ 13. What do you use now? I'm still using my Yamaha HS-80's I've had for a well over 10 years. They were my first real monitors. Got them on clearance sale at my local Guitar Center in Des Moines. It was an unadvertised 50% off sale. Basically buy 1 get 1 free. They had a stacked pyramid of them sitting in the middle of the show room with a sign on them and I figured I'd never see a deal like that again so I grabbed a pair.

'eh. I'm from Jersey you little cazzo. We invented the f-stop.

I wasn't sure where to post this link. All the right people who would know and remember what this reminds me of are here so I figured I'd post it here. Maybe make someone smile and remember the 'good ol days'. (Cue Billy Joel's 'Keeping The Faith') The more things change the more they stay the same ... Crick here.

Sorry to hear that Gary. Prayers and best wishes to your wife and you.

I've only ever had to get my CC involved once. I bought a new TV direct from Samsung a few years ago. They sent a damaged return someone had and sent back at least once before. You could see the box was really messed up and a lot of packing material and a few small parts were missing. They refused to swap it out and refused to give me a refund until they got the damaged one back. They got it back but never refunded my money so I had to get my C.C. company involved. My wife travels a lot for work. She had a waiter at a restaurant in Oregon steal her C.C. info one time. I like watching those guys scam the scammers too. There is one guy I watch that also does it live on Twitch. Here's his youtube channel.

Exactly. It's why it almost seems legit to me. The internet bots are really coming down on pirate sites now and bots take those sites down almost immediately. That place has been around for year. From what I've seen pirated software has mostly gone to private bit torrent servers that you pay a fee to be a member of and then you download whatever you want. It's how the torrent site's get around being responsible for what is posted. I discovered this when I was trying to find ways to download digital copies of movies I own and it led me down that rabbit hole. In the end it was easier to just buy a cheap disc drive and use a tiny free utility and do it myself. There is enough free stuff out there that I see no reason for pirated software. Between Gimp, Blender, and Open Office and the plethora of free plug-in's for both I waved goodbye to Adobe and Microsoft a very very long time ago. And there's more free DAW's, VST's, VSTi's, and samples of every size, shape, and genre you could ever want or use in a lifetime. But again, before totally writing this site off, I would seriously check with Sweetwater or the company who makes it. It could be returned software. Who knows. It's legal to transfer licenses. That's what BiaB was when I got it from Sweetwater. It was a return that they used for demo's at shows and then I got it. I know it was a return because it still had Christmas wrapping paper on the bottom of the box. They all do that stuff all the time. The only reason my scale is tipping toward it being a legitimate site is the fact they've been around so long. But I could be wrong.

There are web sites out there that you can copy/paste their link to and they try to verify if the site is legitimate. I tried it and the site does appear to be legitimate. What I would do is ... contact Sweetwater and say, "Hey, I'd really rather deal with you guys. Can you match this price on this site?". They'll move heaven and Earth to try and prove you wrong and you'll get your answer right away. If it's legit, they'll either give you a good discount or match their price. If it's not legit they'll call you out on it and report them. All signs point to it being a legitimate site. It's secure, it comes up as safe when you scan with other web sites. Here is the site I use to check and see if sites are legit. It says it appears legit. But if you are concerned, I'd throw it on Sweetwater's lap. They just went through a 're-organization' themselves and are looking for sales anywhere they can get them ...

I clicked on the link too, now, and several times a long time ago. It was the typical say a lot of nothing type stuff when buyouts like this happen. I thought we had talked about this before that's why I was shocked to see it again but I must be wrong. No harm in talking about it again though either. I still stand by my thoughts on it. And it still doesn't matter what myself or anyone thinks because they're going to do what they are going to do no matter what they say now and we have 0% input in it. It sure is a good DAW and if they ever do start to charge for it again it's worth it, now. It wasn't when they were charging for it, in my opinion.